2006-01-15

Eesti keele spelleri arendus

As I mentioned in a previous post, I maintain the Debian and Ubuntu package of ispell-et (Estonian dictionaries for the Aspell, Ispell and MySpell spell checkers - plus an hyphenation pattern for OpenOffice). Packaging this software was a natural choice for someone like me who is learning the language and who needs something to highlight obvious mistakes.

This being said, the Estonian wordlists that serve as raw material to generate those dictionaries are in desperate need of Language Love; the vocabulary appears frozen in Soviet time and rather incomplete to begin with: obsolete words nobody can even remember (probably of importance only to linguists or philologists), omission of even the most basic colloquial slangs, complete absence of contemporary technical vocabulary, etc.

Therefore, I am hereby inviting all Estonians to contribute to the development of the wordlist. The procedure is fairly simple: install the Estonian dictionary package for your favorite text editor or word processor (on Ubuntu 6.04, simply install language-support-et), load a few documents and report all words that were mistakenly marked as misspelled to Jaak Pruulmann. As an incentive, please note that all improvements will go into the Estonian version of Edubuntu, providing free language learning tools to Estonian children and thus benefiting the entire Estonian community. Tore homma, eks ole? :-)

1 comment:

Joosep-Georg said...

"Homma" -- there's no such word in estonian, afaik :)