🚀 go-pugleaf

Here are more consolidated answers to the original questions from
Kevin Gross (0004056890@mcimail.com):

     We have a product which offers soundex-based searching for names in
     an address book.  Now that we are producing non-English language
     versions of the product, we'd like to know whether the soundex
     algorithm is appropriate for other languages.  Has anyone ever done
     this?  Does the character classification table need to be changed?

Jeff
INSOFT-L List Manager

*========================================================================*
 Jeff Bowyer                         EMail:
 Computing Center		     jbowyer@cis.vutbr.cz
 Technical University of Brno
 Udolni 19, 602 00 BRNO
 Czech Republic
*========================================================================*


Sender: Emilio Millan (emg2749@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu)

I've come up with a Russian version of the Soundex algorithm.  It is
essentially the same as plain old Soundex except that an additional
category for hushings had to be added.  It works about as well for
Russian as Soundex does for English.  E-mail me if you're interested.


Sender: Jon Wtte (d88-jwa@nada.kth.se)

An INSOFT-L subscriber wrote:
> I used soundex codes several years ago in one of my applications and I
> think it would work moderately well for other European languages, or
> transliterated text for or words from elsewhere.
>
> Soundex code is (at its simplest level) replacing letters or combinations
> of letters with a numeric value and then combining the value into a somewhat
> meaningful code representing an index-like value of the overall sound of the
> word or field.  There's more to it than a simple substitution, but for this
> question it should suffice to say that within broad areas, soundex should
> work moderately to exceptionally well in any of the Romance languages.
> Since pronounciations don't really vary that much from language to language,
> and since the order of the alphabet stays the same, it should work.
>
> This is of course, just theory.  I've never tried Soundex on more than a
> couple of non-English words.  I would be interested to see how it goes.

Soundex doesn't even know about various european characters such
as ao, ae, oe and ue, so stating "Soundex should work moderately
to exceptionally well for most european languages" is plain wrong.
You can do better for Swedish using a homegrown hack than the
published Soundex algorithm (there was some discussion on this