Klingon spelling checker
Tuesday, 14 October 2008 13:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneAfter reading through the documentation on Vim's spelling checker interface (basically: it can read many input files designed for Myspell or hunspell), I thought I'd try a simple Klingon input.
However, after playing around a little, it seemed that the interface isn't really designed for a polysynthetic(?) language such as Klingon, where words can have dozens of affixes[*]. The documentation says that two suffixes and one prefix are supported, but I couldn't even get two suffixes in a row to work.
And while enumerating all possible suffixes is just about doable for nouns, you end up with several hundred combinations; for verbs, it simply isn't feasible, since you have nearly 200'000 combinations even before factoring in rovers or noun suffixes on nominalised verbs.
[*] I'd say that most words seen "in the wild" have no more than two or three suffixes and a prefix, though; words with more suffixes tend to be done for the sake of adding suffixes, rather than as part of natural speech.
For a word with lots of suffixes, consider something along the lines of {jIHoHHa''eghqangbe'qu'qa'moHlaHqu'be'bejtaHneSghach'a'meyqoqwIjmo'}... meaning, perhaps, something along the lines of "because of my so-called major certainly-not-BEING-ABLE-to-continue-to-make-myself-be-UNready-again-to-un-kill-myself-nesses". Rather silly, really.
FWIW, my favourite noun with the maximum number of suffixes is the canon {QaghHommeyHeylIjmo'} "due to your apparent minor errors".
However, after playing around a little, it seemed that the interface isn't really designed for a polysynthetic(?) language such as Klingon, where words can have dozens of affixes[*]. The documentation says that two suffixes and one prefix are supported, but I couldn't even get two suffixes in a row to work.
And while enumerating all possible suffixes is just about doable for nouns, you end up with several hundred combinations; for verbs, it simply isn't feasible, since you have nearly 200'000 combinations even before factoring in rovers or noun suffixes on nominalised verbs.
[*] I'd say that most words seen "in the wild" have no more than two or three suffixes and a prefix, though; words with more suffixes tend to be done for the sake of adding suffixes, rather than as part of natural speech.
For a word with lots of suffixes, consider something along the lines of {jIHoHHa''eghqangbe'qu'qa'moHlaHqu'be'bejtaHneSghach'a'meyqoqwIjmo'}... meaning, perhaps, something along the lines of "because of my so-called major certainly-not-BEING-ABLE-to-continue-to-make-myself-be-UNready-again-to-un-kill-myself-nesses". Rather silly, really.
FWIW, my favourite noun with the maximum number of suffixes is the canon {QaghHommeyHeylIjmo'} "due to your apparent minor errors".