- Name:
./README - Content: Information about Esperanto dictionary for the Ispell speller
- Created: 2024-01-19 by Sergio Pokrovskij
<sergio.pokrovskij(cxe)gmail.com> - Version: 4.3
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2024 by Sergio Pokrovskij
This dictionary package is available on the terms of GNU General Public License version 2.0 (Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA).
- About the Package
- Quick Install
- For the Ispell Utility Program
- Installation from Scratch
- Usage
- Apostrophes
Here is an Esperanto spelling dictionary, compiled by Sergio Pokrovskij for the versions 3+ of Ispell.
The dictionary can also be converted into an eo.utf-8.spl file for
use with the Vim Speller (see :help spell in vim itself).
Some more information is available in Esperanto.
You will need to have Ispell 3.0+; its precompiled package is
available in most of Linux repositories, the source tarball can be
downloaded from its official site; if you compile it from the sources,
make sure that in its local.h the NO8BIT thing is commented out
and MASKBITS = 64. To see the option ispell has been compiled with,
please run
$ ispell -vv | grep MASKBITS
The result should be:
MASKBITS = 64
Here is a binary dictionary eo.hash, made for Linux x86_64. It should be placed where Ispell expects to find it, in my case it is
$ ispell -vv | grep LIBDIR
LIBDIR = "/usr/lib/ispell"
You can test your installation by an ASCII transliteration on any terminal:
$ echo "Kuba harpisto sxajnis amuzigxi facilege cxe via jxauxda hxoro" |\
ispell -T cxirkaux -d eo
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.4.02 08 Jan 2021
word: ok
ok (derives from root HARPI)
ok (derives from root ^SAJNI)
ok (derives from root AMUZI)
ok (derives from root FACILEGA)
ok
ok (derives from root VI)
ok
ok
word:
or by Unicode representation, if your terminal works in UTF-8:
$ echo "Ŝajnas ke sagaca monaĥo laŭtvoĉe refuzadis pregi syr herbaĵo" |\
ispell -P -T utf8 -d eo
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.4.02 08 Jan 2021
word: ok (derives from root ^SAJNI)
ok
ok
ok
ok (derives from root LA^UTVO^CA)
how about: refutadis, reuzadis, rifuzadis
how about: predi, preĝi, premi, preni, presi, preti, puregi, regi
how about: sur
ok (derives from root HERBO)
word:
Also see the section “Usage” below.
If the binary eo.hash proves incompatible with your system, you can
build it yourself from eo.aff and eo.asc:
-
Download the files.
-
Use the
buildhashutility from theispelldistro:buildhash eo.asc eo.aff eo.hash
You now can try the new eo.hash and proceed back to “The Binary File”.
There is an obsolete vimspell plugin for the ubiquitous Vim editor,
which provides an interface to ispell and aspell. You should be
able to use the ispell-eo dictionaries via this interface (I did not
test it). Yet it is no longer supported:
note to VIM 7 users !
Version 7 of vim integrates a native spellchecker which outperforms vimspell script. As such I will not maintain anymore vimspell script, and you are advised to delete all related files from your plugin/ and doc/ directory, and use the native spellchecker instead.
I have written a converter from my Ispell source dictionary to the Vim's Spell format (which is basically the MySpell format).
The ready-made packed dictionary is available for download as
eo.utf-8.spl. You can install it locally for yourself in
$HOME/.vim/spell, or in a system-wide manner in a spell or after
subdirectory of Vim's runtimepath variable. (To examine its value
say :echo &runtimepath).
In order to invoke Esperanto spell say :setlocal spell spelllang=eo.
For help about speller commands see
:h spell
(or see the same documentation on the Web).
Several encodings used with Esperanto text are supported:
-
The very best is Unicode or its subset, which contains the esperantic letters, like the Microsoft's WGL4 or better ISO's MES-1 or MES-2; you can use it with
xtermorEmacsunder Unix, or withUniRedunder Windows.Unicode is available in UTF-8 encoding, which is preferred for the Unices.
-
The second best choice used to be the Latin‑3 encoding (ISO-8859‑3); it is obsolete by now.
-
For the sake of the ASCII-impaired (and ANSI-impaired), there are two surrogates:
-
The TeX-like
^cirka^u-style: e^ho^san^go ^ciu^ja^ude. Presently this is used as the reference representation, mainly because it is unambiguous (cf names like Michaux); and -
The popular
cxirkaux-style, which is also convenient for lexicographical ordering and thus is used in the dictionaries; besides, it uses ASCII letters only, and that makes it suitable for various names in computer programs.
-
-
Clone the
ispel-eoproject into your local repository:$ git clone https://github.com/pok49/ispell-eo -
Go to the root directory
ispell-eo(where thisreadmeresides). -
Say
$ make first(or simply
make) in order to check yourispellprogram. Examine the output, e.g. do you have the permissions to write the hash file(s) at the install phase? -
If everything is OK, say
$ make eo(to built the strict dictionary), or
$ make esperanto(to built a permissive dictionary), or
$ make all(to built both). You may get a few warnings of from
buildhash, like this one:eo.aff line 218: Flag must be alphabeticJust ignore them.
-
Type
$ make installto copy the hash file(s) to where Ispell expects them to be (probably you already have your
american.hashthere; normally you shall need the root rights to make install).
After that you can call, for instance,
$ ispell -d eo -T cxirkaux $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/ekz.cx
(ekz.cx is an ASCII file, in which the Esperantic letters are
presented in cxirkaux-surrogate, as the -T cxirkaux argument
states; this ASCII interface should work on any terminal).
If the prefabricated eo.utf-8.spl dictionary does not work for you,
you could try to pack it on your computer from the files eo_l3.aff
and eo_l3.dic in the ispell-eo/oo/vimspell subdirectory:
$ cd $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/vimspell
$ env LANG=eo.utf-8 vim -u NONE -e -c "mkspell! $HOME/.vim/spell/eo eo" -c q 2>&1 > err
This implies that you have installed the Esperantic eo.utf-8 locale
in your system (available in most Linux distros); it should produce
eoutf-8.spl in the $HOME/.vim/spell/ directory for your private
use.
If you prefer a different composition, you can make the dictionary
yourself. You'll need Emacs to produce the dictionary for MySpell
(which used to work with OpenOffice and which remains the basis of
the Vim's Spell). cd into $HOME/Git/ispell-eo; customize the word
provision as described in “Customized Build” (except the buildhash
and the following steps). In the Makfile check its
vim_spl_install_dir variable; by default it is set for a local
install in your $(HOME)/.vim/spell directory; you may prefer to set
it globally for a system-wide install. Then say
$ make vim
and
$ make install_vim
(the latter may require the administrative rights for a system-wide install).
To see Vim Speller in action please open the test file
$ vim $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/vim-test.u8
and say
:set spell spelllang=eo
In order to enable selective construction of dictionaries, some entries
in the source dictionary ./src/vortoj.l3 are marked with keywords
indicating the special field they belong to:
#arhx : archaic words, like ‹ĥina› (= ‹ĉina›) or ‹malkompreni› (= ‹miskompreni›)
#bot : a rare botanic word
#Eujo : vocabulary of the Esperanto Movement (of ‹Esperantujo›)
#etn : ethnography; actually also countries and other geography
#his : history
#komp : some computer-science terminology according to the Komputada Leksikono
#mav : redundant words, which are used by some esperantists, though they are less precise and unnecessarily complicate the language; e.g. ‹olda› (‹maljuna› or ‹malnova›), ‹mava› (= ‹malbona›)
#mit : mythology, religion
#pers : given names and names of important personalities (e.g. ‹Petro›, ‹Ŝekspiro› …)
#pok : the words specific to my idiolect
#rar : rare words which may coincide with a misspelling of a more frequent word; e.g. ‹ajuna›, ‹komanditi›, ‹liona›
#var : variant which I do not use but which is frequent enough (e.g. ‹kemio›, ‹tekniko› opposed to ‹ĥemio› and ‹teĥniko›)
#zoo : uncommon zoological word
You can grep,
$ grep '#mav' ./src/vortoj.l3 | less
in order to see if you feel like me about them; you can either remove
all of them from the target dictionary, or remove the #mav mark from
those you do use and like; the default setting in the ./Makefile is
short_list = komp,etn,Eujo,mll
pok_list = $(short_list),bot,fremd,his,pok,pers,var,zoo
eo_list = $(short_list),drv
esperanto_list = $(short_list),arhx,mav,rar
Unless included in the custom list (like eo_list), a marked word is
considered as a special one and is excluded from the build.
When preparing a dictionary for the Vim Speller it is advisable to
retain the entries marked with #mav and #rar: in Vim Spell
dictionary they will receive the qualifications BAD and RAR and as
such will be warned about in an appropriate manner.
One same Ispell dictionary, e.g. eo.hash, can be used with several
input representations, specified in its affix file (e.g. eo.aff).
Each such representation can be identified by a name (used in ispell
invocation as ‘‑T identifier’ argument), or by the extension of the
argument filename; both identification kinds are specified in the
affix file. In case of identification conflict the name argument takes
precedence.
eo.aff defines the following representations:
tex(the extensions are.texor.bib)is suited for TeX, and imitates the dead keys:e^ho^san^g^' ^ciu^ja^de. It is the representation for whichispell-eowas originally designed (in connection with the “Komputika Leksikono”), and it remains the basic representation used inispell-eointernally.cxirkaux(or.cxor.t) identifies the x‑style representation, which is the most popular ASCIIization of the Esperanto letters;ehxosxangx' cxiujxauxde.latin3(or.l3) is the straightforward application of ISO 8859‑3 (aka Latin‑3), which gives all the accented esperantic letters their canonical form; the apostrophe is represented as the ASCII'(0x27).epo(or.la3or.wiki) is likelatin3, except that the apostrophe is represented by ‹´› (0xB4, spacing acute; see below the section “Apostrophes”);epois the standard 3-letter designation of Esperanto in ISO 639.- In
utf8(.html,.u8,.utf) the accented letters are coded by 2 bytes each according to the UTF-8 encoding; apostrophe is encoded as ‹ʼ› (U+02BC,#xCA #xBC, modifier letter apostrophe).
Unlike Aspell or Hunspell, Ispell allows switching among these
representations (via the -T flag: ‑T tex, or ‑T utf8 etc) while
using the same hash file; this is an advantage of Ispell. OTOH
variation in the word provision (e.g. inclusion or exclusion of the
“bad” words) requires compilation of separate hash files (in our case,
eo.hash vs esperanto.hash); here Hunspell and Vim Speller are more
flexible, they make it possible to retain the bad words and mark their
use in a special way.
Some usage examples below are illustrated with specimen files from the
ispell-eo/doc directory (which in my case is in my local
$HOME/Git/ repository). This should give you an idea about where and
what kind of files could be used in a given situation.
You can use Ispell in a stand-alone mode, as a console program. The usage depends on the encodings available at your terminal emulator for representing the Esperanto letters.
This is available anywhere, you can use the tex (TeX) or the
cxirkaux representation. In the tex representation the word
ĉirkaŭ takes the form ^cirka^u; in the latter case both esperantic
accents are expressed with the letter x, do cxirkaux. In order to
check a file with the Ispell dialog editor simply type (for the
x‑notation):
ispell -d eo -T cxirkaux $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/ekz.cx
or (fro the TeX notation):
$ ispell -d eo -T tex $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/ekz.^c
The resulting dialog is self-explanatory.
You also can request a list of misspelt words, e.g.
$ cat -b $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/ekz.cx
$ ispell -d eo -T cxirkaux -l < $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/ekz.cx
1 Por ke la linguo intrenacia povu bone kaj regule progresadi kaj por ke
2 gxi havu plenan cetrecon, ke gxi neniam disfalos kaj ia facxilanima
3 pasxo de gxiaj amikoj estontaj ne detruos la laborojn de gxiaj amikoj
4 estitaj, -- estas plej necesa antaux cxio unu kondico: la ekzistado de
5 klare difinita, neniam tusxebla kaj neniam sxangxebla Fundamento ...
6 en nova form' eksonis nova kant'
linguo
intrenacia
cetrecon
facxilanima
estitaj
kondico
Unfortunately, the Ispell editor is unaware of multibyte characters.
Ispell is two decades older than Unicode; yet it is possible to use its general specification facilities to define the UTF-8 encoding of the Esperantic letters, and it partially works.
The modern Linux terminals use the UTF-8 encoding by default, so you can say there:
$ ispell -d eo -T utf8 $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/testo.u8
or submit test words in the command line:
$ echo "faĉilanima paŝo de ĝiaj anikoj estitaj" | ispell -T utf8 -d eo
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.4.02 08 Jan 2021
word: how about: facilanima
ok (derives from root PA^SI)
ok
ok (derives from root ^GI)
how about: amikoj, anigoj, aniĝoj, animoj, aninoj, anizoj, manikoj, panikoj, unikoj
how about: estigaj, estiĝaj, estimaj, estintaj, estritaj, festitaj, ostitaj, testitaj, vestitaj, esti+taj, estu-u+itaj
word:
(The suggestions are presented in the TeX notation.)
You can also get a list of all misspelled or unknown words from a text:
$ head -9 $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/Cart.u8
AL Sinjoro fruictier.
Kara Amiko!
Vi petis, ke mi prezentu vian libron al Esperantistaro.
Prezentadon ĝi ne bezonas: ne sole ĉar la ĉefredaktoro
de »Lingvo Internacia« jam elmontris sian valoron, sed
precipe ĉar lia verko estas kunmetita laŭ principoj
de severega metodo. Eĵektive, kio eslas farita per Scienco
kaj en ĝia nomo, tio tute ne bezonas patronadon, ĉar
ne ekzistas pli atta.
$ head -9 $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/Cart.u8 | ispell -d eo -T utf8 -l
fruictier
Eĵektive
eslas
atta
(The file Cart.u8 is produced by OCR of a letter by Th. Cart to Paul
Fruictier, published as a foreword to “Esperanta Sintakso” by the
latter. The letter is printed in italics.)
Such a short file is more conveniently corrected in a text editor via its speller interface (see “Emacs” below); but when editing a large file, e.g. a scan of a book such as Historio de Mondolingvo by E. Drezen, it may be advantageous to get a list of most numerous errors; in Unix this can be done with a one-liner:
$ ispell -H -l -d eo -T utf8 < Drezen.html | sort -if | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -12
215 ciuj
209 tin
185 gi
168 lau
167 ankau
156 ce
143 au
127 ec
120 in
120 autoro
112 Paris
109 Volapiik
(the 1st column indicates the number of occurrences of the error). With such a list one can correct hundreds or dozens of errors with a single command.
You may safely skip this section, unless you are interestwed in history of computing or have to use software which accepts only single-byte encodings.
The ISO 8859‑3 encoding, aka Latin‑3, is now rarely used; yet it is for
such a single-byte encoding that Ispell was developed. Presently a
Latin‑3 terminal is not readily available; one could install xterm and
its luit package; and then either launch xterm in Latin‑3:
$ xterm -en 'ISO 8859-3' &
or use luit as a filter:
$ luit -encoding 'ISO 8859-3' echo eĥoŝanĝo | od -c
0000000 e 266 o 376 a n 370 o \n
0000011
(the echo|od commands attest that the non-ASCII letters are encoded
in Latin‑3).
In this environment the dialog Ispell Editor shall work as expected:
ispell -d eo -T latin3 $HOME/Git/ispell-eo/doc/testo.l3
(the file testo.l3 is written in the Latin‑3 encoding).
Normally I use Ispell in an Emacs session. Emacs is distributed with
the ispell.el package, which provides an interface with the ispell
processes (see “InteractiveSpell” in Emacs' Wiki). This package
includes, among others, specifications for interactions with the
permissive esperanto dictionary in two representations: latin3 and
tex; in ispell.el they are named resp. esperanto and
esperanto-tex.
Don't be affraid of the name latin3: your text may be (and normally
is) in Unicode; the program seamlessly converts your UTF-8 words to
Latin‑3 and back, using Latin‑3 behind the scenes, so that you never notice
it. The only exception is the limitation of the repertoire of the
characters available for word representation: e.g. you cannot use the curly
apostrophe, which is absent from Latin‑3, and thus cannot be passed to
ispell.
As mentioned earlier, the Esperantic Ispell dictionaries can accept the
UTF-8 input; alas, for some bugs in ispell.el conversions from the
integer Unicode numbers to multibyte UTF-8 and back “may result in the
evil misalignment error”; the interaction with 1-byte codes (e.g.
Latin‑3) is more stable.
In my practical work I prefer the stricter eo.hash dictionary (and
the x‑style ASCIIization); both are made available via the
./emacs/ispell-ini.el customization included in this distribution.
You may copy it into your site-lisp (or somewhere else on your emacs'
load-path), and put this into your .emacs:
(load "ispell-ini.el")
ispell-ini.el provides access to the hash dictionaries via the
names of the Esperanto representations it defines:
eo : latin3(eo.hash) epo : epo(eo.hash) eo-x : cxirkaux(eo.hash) esperanto-x : cxirkaux(esperanto.hash)
The representation names latin3, , cxirkax are described above in
“Esperanto encodings”. epo is basically latin3 extended with a
special care of the curly apostrophes; it enables use (and check) of
Unicode coded texts, even though the stable ispell representation is
functioning in the single-byte Latin‑3 encoding. This solution is
presented in the next section.
In English, the apostrophes appear either inside a word, like in
isn't (and this case is addressed by the boundarychars
specification), or after a well-formed word, like in for goodness'
sake (where the exclusion of the apostrophe does not raise a false
error report). Confusions with quotes are infrequent, yet possible:
$ echo 'Tis the season to be jolly! | ispell | head -2
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.4.02 08 Jan 2021
word: how about: Dis, His, Is, Its, Otis, Pis, Sis, T's, TAs, This, Ti, Ti's, Tia, Tic, Tics, Tie, Ties, Tim, Tims, Tin, Tins, Tip, Tips, Tit, Tits, Ti s, Ti-s, Ts, TVs, T is, T-is, Vis
In Esperanto apostrophes appear mainly as the last of the wordʼs characters, i.e. in a most error-prone position:
en nova form' eksonis nova kant'
Ispell and Aspell are able to treat such postfix apostrophes; Hunspell
and Vim Speller take account of non-letter characters (e.g. - or
') only inside a word, when they occur between two letters.
Actually the fine typography requires a curly apostrophe, and Unicode offers two options:
- the modifier letter apostrophe ‹ʼ› U+02BC, and
- the right single quotation mark ‹’› U+2019.
The letter apostrophe is classified by Unicode as a letter, and as such perfectly suits the Esperantic spelling dictionaries for Hunspell and Vim Speller; hence the Hunspell spelling dictionary for Esperanto, distributed with LibreOffice, as well as my conversion for Vim Speller both cannot but opt for U+02BC.
Unfortunately the impact of the English (or rather Microsoft's) tradition imposes the use of U+2019 (e.g. great many fonts which follow the Microsoftʼs WGL4 standard have U+2019 and lack U+02BC). Also the Unicode® Standard 15.1.0 (2023 Sept. 12), Chapter 6, supports this confusion:
An implementation cannot assume that users’ text always adheres to the distinction between these characters. The text may come from different sources, including mapping from other character sets that do not make this distinction between the letter apostrophe and the punctuation apostrophe/right single quotation mark. In that case, all of them will generally be represented by U+2019.
The semantics of U+2019 are therefore context dependent. For example, if surrounded by letters or digits on both sides, it behaves as an in-text punctuation character and does not separate words or lines.
This Wrong Thing works for English and French; it fails for Esperanto and other languages where apostrophes may behave as a word element at the word boundary; i.e. the ISO standard is not international enough.
In an Ispell specification any character may be declared a letter;
thus the eo, esperanto, eo-x, esperanto-x representations use the
ASCII apostrophe ‹'›; the utf8 (unavailable via the ispell.el
interface) uses U+2019 (this can be changed to U+02BC by replacing one
line in the affix file). Unfortunately the interaction between the
utf8 representation in Ispell and ispell.el remains unstable for
“the evil misalignment error”.
As a workaround, alongside the traditional latin3 representation,
which uses the ASCII apostrophe, there is the epo representation in
Ispell, in which the ASCII apostrophe is ignored (and available for
any non-lexical usage); the Esperantic letter apostrophe is
represented by the otherwise unused Latin‑3 character ‹´› (spacing
acute, 0xB4). Now, the attached ispell-ini.el file advises the
interface functions ispell-send-string and ispell-parse-output in
such a way, that in the input string sent to the Ispell process the
curly apostrophes (either U+2019 or U+02BC) are replaced with 0xB4;
and in the Ispellʼs output this character (if any) is recoded back to
the “canonical” apostrophe representation, specified by the
ispell-apostrophe Elisp variable. Its default value is U+2019 (right
quote), but it can be toggled to U+02BC and back by the interactive
Elisp function
M-x ispell-set-apostrophe
When given a numeric prefix, this function can also set the variable unconditionally: with 1 it is set to the letter apostrophe ‹ʼ›; with 2, to the right quotation mark ‹’›.
In informal writing one usually would prefer the easier ASCII
apostrophes, and apply the eo spellcheck; epo is appropriate when
one in preparing a typographic quality text, or when the ASCII
apostrophe is used for some extra-lingual purpose, like in Wikipedia
sources.
Take for example the source text of article «Majusklo» in the Esperanto Wikipedia (triple apostrophes are the boldface mark):
'''Majusklo''' (aŭ '''grandlitero''' aŭ '''ĉeflitero''')
estas unu el du formoj, kiujn povas havi ĉiu litero ...
The eo spellcheck would complain about the inexistent words
'''Majusklo''', '''grandlitero''', '''ĉeflitero'''
Please note that such a nuisance does not occur in English or French,
where the apostrophes are recognized only within a word, between two letters.
On the one hand this is a language-dependent feature, which is not
equally convenient internationally (but was Wikipedia conceived as an
international project?). On the other hand, it may be useful to
promote the typographically preferable form of the apostrophes.
ispell.el provides the spell-change-dictionary function, bound to
C-c i c, ekz‑e
C-c i c RET epo RET selects the epo “dictionary” with ‹’›;
C-c i c RET eo RET selects the eo “dictionary” with ‹'›.
It can also be invoked from the menu:
Tools → Spell Checking → Change Dictionary ...
ispell-ini.el adds a few commands for easier switching:
C-c i 3 sets the Esperanto eo (latin3) dictionary
C-u C-c i 3 sets the Esperanto epo dictionary
C-c i x sets the Esperanto eo-x dictionary
C-u C-c i x sets the esperanto-x dictionary
C-c i a sets the American English dictionary
C-c i f sets the French dictionary
C-c i p sets the Russian dictionary.
In order to input curly apostrophes ispell.el provides the command
C-c i '
It inserts U+2019 or U+02BC, according to the current value of
ispell-apostrophe.
The quotation marks can be inputted pairwise, and the cursor is positioned in between; if there is an active region, the quotation marks are put around it. The commands (shortcuts) are:
C-c " makes a pair of guillemets «│»
C-c 9 makes a 99—66 pair: „│“
C-c < makes a pair of single guillemets: ‹│›
C-c 6 makes a 66—99 pair: “│”.
- Pri apostrofoj kaj citiloj en Esperanto (in Esperanto)
- Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong)
- Getting Emacs to play nice with Hunspell and apostrophes (a thread
in the
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>forum)