Changing orthographies in OmegaWiki

Some languages have a standardised orthography. The correct spelling are often defined by a standardbody and often the correct spelling is defined by an act of parliament. Both the Dutch and the German languages have such a system, there may be more. Interesting is that both nl and de are in the process of changing their spelling.

The Dutch changes

On October 15 2005, the list of changes will be officially published. On August 1 2006 the changes will be effective. In essence it is still the same orthography but it changes .. The table ValidExpression, will say what word is valid from 1-8-2006 and what word will be invalidated at this date. It means that only the words that change their spelling will need to be added. They and the words they replace need changing.

The German changes

In essence it is exactly the same. This change will however not be valid for the whole of Germany because two Bundeslaender did not put these changes into law. The mechanism is however identical. Now the Germans might want to choose if they want an old spelling or a new spelling.

From a practical point of view, I would prefer to assume that Germany is one country and as such only show the latest spelling. When we have the time, we can add a special query for old spellings. The essential point is, that we CAN show changes within one orthography.

Lower Saxon

Lower Saxon is in one way a mess. There are some 200 different orthographies and one of the more relevant, Sass, has two versions. The consequence is, that to treat both of them as Sass, you have to date these as well. In a way Sass has the same function as a standardbody.

For the other orthographies, only words with an indicated orthographies are relevant for the building of spellcheckers. Words that are only nds, need more work; they have to be change to indicate the orthography that they belong to. Untill we have the software for automagic duplication, every word has to be entered for each orthography were it can be found.

Sicilian and Neopolitan

In languages like these, there are multiple spellings that indicate to some extend that they are from a certain region. However, these differences are all deemed to be correct. Therefore the building of a spellchecker is quite different depending on how the different orthographies are perceived.