Re: arabic ispell

["Nadav Har'El" <nyh at math dot technion dot ac dot il>]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2001, Isam Bayazidi wrote about "Re: arabic ispell":
> Well arabic is the same .. but is we will depend on the base word derivation 
> it Will get very complex .. checking from a list of words is a better choice 
> since not all base words have all the possible derivations ..

In Hebrew (and I believe the situation in Arabic is very similar), the many
noun inflections (singular/plural, possesives, etc. - 20 words from each base
noun!) are always possible for every (or almost every) noun, and making the
complete word list by hand you'll surely forget some of them... For verbs,
Hebrew has 7 "binyanim", 7 major ways to conjugate verbs, and each root
usually can be used in several (though usually not all) of these "binyanim".
Again, just specifying the list of legal "binyanim" for each root is much less
error prone than specifying the full list containing the dozens words
conjugated from that one root.

Of course, this "shortcut" means that the program will need to know how to
inflect nouns and conjugate verbs for a given base noun or verb root, and
perhaps a few more hints (such as the list of "binyanim" this root accepts).
It's not easy, but it's doable.

If you can create a good word list without writing a conjugation/inflection
program, then by all means do so. But I personally found it a very boring and
error prone process: the worst thing is that it's easy for one form of the
word to slip in misspelled, while the rest are spelled correctly.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Thursday, Oct 18 2001, 1 Heshvan 5762
nyh at math dot technion dot ac dot il             |-----------------------------------------
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http://nadav.harel.org.il           |therefore I'm ham."