[Lexicog] Spellchecking Unicode in MS-Office

[Jan F. Ullrich]

> The first question I would ask is, why associate Lakota text with 
> English? I assume by this you mean that Word thinks the Lakota text is 
> English, but you have somehow substituted another spell checker (else 
> all the words in the text would have red underlines).

> I'm not sure what the method is to tell Word (and the other MsOffice 
> products) that there is a language called Lakota, but there must be one 
> (since Ms is very involved in and knowledgeable about 
> internationalization). And presumably that is where you define the 
> word-forming characters of the language.

MS Word offers some minority languages for the spellchecking features, such as Mohawk and Maori, but certainly not all. And Lakota is not there, indeed. Frankly, I don’t think that it is purely Microsoft’s fault, since in many of the languages are under documented and lack standardization. Even the Lakota language has been undergoing standardization only since quite recently considering that it has been first put to writing some 160 years ago.

Moreover, there is no access to the built in spellchecking dictionaries or algorithms, so the only way to create a spellchecker for a language not present is to create a custom dictionary. Since our spellchecker would be based only on a custom dictionary (a list of lexemes linked with MS Word) it actually doesn’t matter which language is associated with the text as long as all the Lakota characters are recognized in that language.

Some of the list members informed me that the latest version of MS Office products does recognize h-caron. So I went ahead and obtained a copy and indeed, spellchecking Lakota in the standard orthography is now possible with a custom dictionary. Thanks to everybody for their input.

Jan





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