Aspell Arabic support

["Moe Elzubeir" <elzubeir at cobaf dot coba dot unt dot edu>]

Hello,

I have been trying to contact Kevin Atkinson on various email addresses
(including the sourceforge AND dhs.org accounts), but have not received
a single response. I hope that someone on this list may either be able
to answer my questions, or Kevin would actually receive this.

I would like to add Arabic support to Aspell/pspell and would like to
get some feedback on how to go about doing it. So, first let me answer
some of the basic questions you may require:

Language: Arabic
Charset Maps --  Default: ISO8859-6
Phonetic Spelling: Mostly
Affication Level: High

I am not sure what 'run-together-words' really means, so I can't really
answer that.

Using 8-bit characters internally as far Arabic is concerned is not a
problem, although you would gain a lot more accuracy by considering
double-width characters.

I do NOT have a sample list of words as of yet, and am more interested
in the current engine's flexibility and its ability to adapt to the
Arabic language.

Arabic, for those who don't know, does not only expect letters to be
added to its end, but root verbs do have insertions in the front, middle
and end (prefix, middle, suffix). This adds a whole lot of complexity
that I am not sure is easily integrated with the current pspell library.

I am willing to invest my time and energy on adding those features, but
would appreciate some pointers and any help I can get. Unfortunately,
for the past few months, not a SINGLE email I have sent (or any of my
colleagues) have been replied to. I am not sure whether the error is on
our side, or our messages simply don't get to their intended audience.

In any case, we would really like to hear back from ANYONE who is
responsible for Aspell. I am confused as to who is maintaining
Aspell/Pspell/New Aspell and all those branchesand merges of
spell-checkers and libraries. It would be ideal that we would add such
support to an existing popular and well-accepted spell-checker as
opposed to writing our own from scratch.

I apologize for the harsh tone, but we have been trying to get a hold of
anyone to help or even tell us where to go, but after a couple months of
trying, one does tend to get frustrated.

Thank you.
Mohammed Elzubeir