[Lexicog] Spellchecking Unicode in MS-Office

[Hayim Sheynin]

Dear Jan,

Even such great nations as Russia with a long tradition of literacy
changed several characters
in their standardized orthography.

In Hebrew culture there are discussions about reform of writing for long time.

Hayim

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Jan F. Ullrich <jfu at centrum.cz> wrote:
> Dear Hayim,
>
>
>
> Changing a character in a standardized orthography is not an option.
>
>
>
> Jan
>
>
>
> From: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Hayim Sheynin
> Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 5:57 PM
> To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Spellchecking Unicode in MS-Office
>
>
>
> Dear Jan,
>
> Would you consider changing the graphem to one of the following
>
> Ĥ Latin capital letter H with circumflex (UnicodeLatin Extended-A 0124
> ĥ Latin small letter h with circumflex (Unicode Latin Extended-A 0125
>
> or
>
> Ħ Latin capital letter H with stroke (UnicodeLatin Extended-A 0126)
> ħ Latin small letter h with stroke (Unicode Latin Extended-A 0127)
>
> If you didn't use these characters I think it worth to try them.
>
> Best luck,
>
> Hayim Sheynin
>
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 6:05 AM, Jan F. Ullrich <jfu at centrum.cz> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Dear lexicographers,
>>
>>
>>
>> I wonder if someone here could advice about the following problem. Years
>> ago, before the full development of Unicode and Unicode fonts we created
>> our
>> own fonts for the Lakota language. In those fonts the needed characters
>> were
>> set to codes of characters not present in the language. For instance we
>> used
>> umlaut vowels. This solution was imperfect but beside other things it
>> allowed us to take advantage of Microsoft Word spellchecking function. We
>> simply created a list words and word forms and inserted them into a custom
>> dictionary for MS-Word. Of course, this was a simplistic spellchecker, one
>> that could not cover all the word forms of the language, but at that time
>> it
>> actually represented a helpful tool for our students and language
>> teachers.
>>
>>
>>
>> A few years ago we transferred all of our textual materials into Unicode
>> and
>> we also programmed a powerful morphoparser and lemmatizer that help us
>> create a quite comprehensive list of word forms. But we are having a
>> problem
>> using this list for spell-checking in MS-Office, because one of the
>> Unicode
>> characters that we use is not recognized by MS-Word. It is the Latin
>> letter
>> h with caron (U+021F)
>> (http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/021f/index.htm). MS-Word
>> won't
>> consider this letter a part of the word no matter what we do and this
>> disables using the spellchecking functions in that editor. It causes
>> problems in other ways too, for instance in searching for words within a
>> document, in various formatting operations etc.
>>
>> We found out that the character is recognized when we associate the text
>> with a different language for spellchecking, for instance French, but then
>> other characters are not recognized. If we keep the text assigned to
>> English
>> spellchecking (which is desired) then it is only h-caron that is not
>> recognized.
>>
>>
>>
>> I do not know enough about Unicode to figure out how to solve this. For
>> instance I don't know if the character recognition within MS-Word a
>> feature
>> of MS-Word or of Unicode. Couple years back we contacted Microsoft about
>> this but we received no response.
>>
>> I am aware that there are other options for spell-checking a text, but
>> since
>> the MS-Word is such a main-stream editor used in most schools and colleges
>> where the Lakota language is taught and used, it would be really nice if
>> we
>> could make the spellchecking function work in it.
>>
>>
>>
>> We would really appreciate any advice on how solve this?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Jan
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Jan F. Ullrich, Linguistic Director
>>
>> Lakota Language Consortium
>>
>> www.lakhota.org
>>
>> e-mail: jfu at lakhota.org
>>
>> Skype: janfull
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> 

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