🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <167C0773A.GILMART@LSTC2VM.stortek.com> GILMART@LSTC2VM.stortek.com (Paul Gilmartin) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr3.154246.21468@ee.rochester.edu> wengler@ee.rochester.edu (Mikey) writes:
>>|I'm getting no error on the word 'dependant'
>>
>>I won't claim there aren't cases where the Word dictionaries are wrong,
>>but this isn't one of them.

[various people have kindly or not so told poor Mikey that you can
spell 'dependent' any way you like, so Word is right]

>Now that the original poster has been suitably humiliated, I'd like to take
>his side a little further.  While either "dependent" or "dependant" may be
>acceptable according to a sufficiently comprehensive dictionary, it's poor
>style to use both in the same document.  I know, I said "style", not
>"spelling", but it would surely be a desirable feature of a spelling checker
>to note use of a secondary spelling, and ask me which alternative I wish to
>use for the rest of the document.

I think this should soon move to alt.english.usage, but here goes
anyway.  Spell checkers are only that -- spell checkers.  The don't
parse your text to see what you really meant or anything like that.
Given this, the fewer word the better, since if you have more esoteric
words in the dictionary you have more likelyhood of a match between an
esoteric word and a badly spelled mundane word.  This is the gist of
your argument, I take it.

However, we have a problem.  As far as I know (after consulting one
dictionary) 'dependent' and 'dependant' are not alternative spellings
of the same word (i.e. not just a style difference).  Rather,
'dependant' is a Noun (alternatively spelt 'dependent'), while
'dependent' is an adjective (with no alternative spelling).  The
primary spelling of the Noun is with an 'a' while the only spelling of
the adjective is with an 'e'.  Since the spell checker can't tell
adjectives from nouns, surely you would want both in there and hope
for the best.

'the' is a *terrible* spelling of 'then' (and vice versa) but
spellcheckers can never catch that mistake, which, although a little
more extreme, is really of the same ilk.

>Likewise, it would be useful if the user dictionary could suppress entries
>in the main dictionary which are prohibited by local styles.  For example,
>a friend doing her dissertation lately faced a departmental rule that all
>French words should appear with correct accents.  Word dictionary contains
>many common French terms (e.g. "siecle") without accents, and there's no
>way we can overrule Word and say we prefer not to tolerate "dependant" or
>unaccented "siecle".

This is true, and it might be nice.  Perhaps what really is needed is
a real dictionary editor, so that we can create our own dictionarys
fairly easily.  Don't tell me Nisis has one... :-) 


Alan Munn