🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <87pvfit8j1.fsf@fun13.kivikko.hoas.fi> Jouni K Seppanen
<jks@iki.fi> writes:

> To the best of my knowledge, there is no useful, freely available
> Finnish lexicon.  One problem is that you would have to teach ispell
> to understand Finnish morphology, a nontrivial task indeed.

Indeed.  My understanding is that Finnish, like Turkish, is an
agglutinative language.  That means that it's impossible to build a
canonical list of words; it's like German compounds only a thousand
times worse.

There has been work done on the problem of spell-checking
agglutinative languages, but the approach required is based on
building a finite-state automaton, rather than a hash table.  That
means that ispell would have to be rewritten from the ground up
(something I've thought about, but not had time to do) to handle these
languages.
-- 
    Geoff Kuenning   geoff@fmg.cs.ucla.edu   http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
                -- Isaac Asimov