Re: gspell.el - german spell and grammar checking

[Toby Cubitt]

Sebastian Meisel wrote:
> Hund"-haar is wrong, but Hunde"-haar is correct. In both cases gspell.el 
> will mark Hund as probably correct.  So  it  is a help, but  still needs 
> the user  to  know  about  correct spelling.

German (and indeed French, Spanish and most other European languages 
other than English) would seem to be a case in which a spell-checker 
needs to take additional grammatical information into account, rather 
than simply checking strings against a predefined word list (I know 
i/aspell is slightly more sophisticated than this). For example, the 
gender of "Haar".

I guess for most languages, adjective-noun, verb-subject, and 
gender/number agreement are dismissed as being a job for a 
grammar-checker, not a spell-checker. German is interesting in that, 
because of its habit of running multiple words together into one, this 
same issue suddenly looks more like a job for the spell-checker again.

I agree with Sebastian that i/aspell simply aren't flexible enough for 
this. Maybe someone else knows if there are any free-software grammar 
checkers out there that could be used to help with this. Though I don't 
underestimate the difficulty involved: German with it's weak/strong 
masculine endings (never did get my head around that one) and other 
grammatical niceties must be a particular pain for computers. The only 
one I'm aware of is Link: http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/index.html. 
But there may be others that take a more traditional approach.

Just my 2 Euro-cents...

Toby