[aspell-devel] Working on a new aspell dict

[Chris Hornbaker]

Hello,
  I rudely sent the following to Kevin Atkinson initially. (Sorry, Kevin!)

  I'm working on a Lojban dict for aspell. Using generic it works quite well.
I am, however, running into some trouble with this language's fairly strict
rules and am in need of some advice.

(Background: Sections 1, 3, 5, and 6 of "Reference Grammar" chapter 4
http://lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter4.html)

First:
 When a rafsi (gismu short-form, gismu being a root word) in a lujvo
(compound word) has the CVV-form and is used at the beginning of a
lujvo, a "r" or, in some cases, a "n" is placed at the end (thus creating a
CVVC-form) to meet the requirement of brivla (predicate word) having
a "...consonant pair in the first five letters, where "y'' and apostrophe
are not counted as letters for this purpose."

 For example, the lujvo "jaurbumru" is made up of the rafsi "jau", which
is derived from the gismu "djacu" meaning "water", and the gismu
"bumru", meaning "fog". The "r" is used to satisfy the requirement of
of a brivla having a consonant pair in the first five letters. "n" could be
used in place of "r", also.

Second:
 "y" is used when two rafsi or rasfi + gismu come together and make
an invalid consonant pair, such as "ll", "bb", "cc", "dd",.... double
consonants in general.

 For example, (shamelessly taken from the book) the gismu "pante",
meaning "protest", and "tavla", meaning "talk", have the rafsi "pat"
and "ta'a", respectively. The resulting lujvo, "patta'a", contains a
double consonant, thus making it invalid. Adding a "y" between "tt",
"patyta'a" makes it valid.

Third:
 Lojban doesn't really require spaces. They do make reading much
easier (and so people use them). One thing I'm stuck on is items like
".iji'a". ".i" means "new sentence", as opposed to English's use of ?, .,
and ! for "end of sentence". What ".iji'a" is saying here is "(new
sentence) In addition,". This is all perfectly legitimate, but the only
way I've been able to solved this is by setting run-together-min to 1.
Of course, this makes everything valid, so that won't work.

Forth:
 All Lojban characters are to be lower-case. The only exception is
names, where you capitalize parts of the name to highlight
stresses. For example, the name "Robert" in would "robyt", in UK
English, while, in French, it would be "roBER".

Now, I don't see any reason to add all the different spellings of
names under the sun, so I'll skip that. But, how do I ensure that
the words are always lower-case?

Thanks,
Christopher Hornbaker           Email: address@hidden
Jabber ID: address@hidden     http://www.openschooling.org
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