NAME
irish - flag format for Irish Ispell dictionaries
DESCRIPTION
Irish dictionaries for Ispell(1) supports 3 prefix and 14 suffix flags.
For a detailed description of how Ispell handles flags and
capitalization, see Ispell(4). This manual page only describes flags
usable in dictionaries built using the gaeilge.aff affix file.
The definitive meanings of the affixes is given in the file
/usr/lib/ispell/gaeilge.aff but some of the reasoning and notes are
given here.
Irish has an unusual (unique?) capitalization rule, which needs special
handling. Prefixes for eclipsis are not capitalized., e.g. an
tEarrach. Ispell(5) assumes that in an uncapitalized word, the first
letter may be capitalized, so Earrach would be incorrectly prefixed and
capitalized as Tearrach.
The file irish-prefixes.pl is a perl(1) script to preprocess the
wordlist, and add ’by hand’ the correct capitalization. It will turn
Earrach/P
into
Earrach
tEarrach
etc. It strips off the E and P flags used for eclipsis and leaves any
other flags intact. The word should be Capitalized in the the word
list; if the uncapitalized version is left in the word list with the
flag, it will generate incorrect words, so enter the uncapitalized and
capitalized versions seperately.
One ’ordinary’ prefix is handled by Ispell, H is used for aspiration of
nouns, etc. (Verbs are handled separately).
Twelve suffixes are used for handling regular verbs. We use three
suffixes each per conguation: one listing all suffixes available to
both aspirated and unaspirated forms, one listing aspirated forms only,
and one for unaspirated forms. So, for the verb mol for example, we
have in the words list
mol/BC
mhol/BD
so the ’B’ set of endings apply to both forms, the ’C’ set to
unaspirated only, and ’D’ to aspirated only. This pattern is repeated
for all four conjugations.
Irregular verbs just appear in the list in toto.
Two other suffixes are currently defined, , ’O’ for Caolú
(attenuation), and ’Q’for Leathnú (broadening).
BUGS
The dictionary is very small, and pretty incomplete. Any help would be
appreciated. Please mail additions and corrections to
mckinstry@computer.org
SEE ALSO
Ispell(1), Ispell(5), english(5)
2002-04-11 IRISH(5)