--- /dev/null
+Unofficial Alternate 12Dicts package (Alt12Dicts)
+Files by Alan Beale
+Packaged by Kevin Atkinson
+
+Revision 4
+August 6, 2004
+
+The files contained in this archive are the result of a rather
+extensive conversation between me (Kevin Atkinson) and Alan Beale, the
+author of the 12Dicts package. I can be contacted at kevina@gnu.org
+and Alan Beale can be contacted at biljir@pobox.com. This archive
+contains almost all the information in the official 12Dicts package
+but in a different format as well as a good deal of additional
+information. However it is not meant as a replacement for the
+official 12Dicts package. It simply offers the information in a
+different way.
+
+This package corresponds to Version 4.0 of the official 12Dicts package.
+
+The latest version of this package and the official 12Dicts package can
+be found at http://aspell.sourceforge.net/wl/.
+
+The file README-orig contains the original Readme file distributed
+with the official 12Dicts package. README-infl contains the Readme
+file for 2of12infl.txt and finally README-agid contains the Readme for
+AGID which 2of12infl.txt is based on.
+
+All of these files have been explicitly placed in the Public Domain by
+Alan Beale.
+
+
+2of12full.txt description:
+
+The file 2of12full.txt contains the all words appearing in more than
+than one of Alan Beale's source dictionaries. Each line contains four
+numbers, being the total number of dictionaries, the non-variant
+entries, the variant entries, and the non-American entries. Counts of
+zero are replaced by hyphens. For instance, the entry
+
+ 7: - 2# 5& aeroplane
+
+indicates that the word "aeroplane" is listed in 7 of the dictionaries.
+None list it as a primary American word, 2 list it as a variant form,
+and 5 list it as a non-American word. Note that words may be marked
+with a "&" for either of 2 reasons. They may represent a non-American
+spelling of an American word, such as "aeroplane" or "gaol", or they
+may represent a word not normally used in American English, such as
+"bloke" or "lorry".
+
+Words marked with a colon (":") after it are abbrivations which are
+entirely lower-case and alphabetic.
+
+This file contains almost all the information found in the normal
+12Dicts package except for the marking of "second class", the
+inclusion of "signature words" which did not appear in at least two
+dictionaries. A second class word is a word that that an inflection
+which was defined in the same entry as the base word, is a derived
+word (-ly, -ness or -er/or) which was not defined in a separate entry,
+or appeared in a list of undefined words with a common prefix, such as
+un- or re-.
+
+
+signature.txt description:
+
+The file signature.txt contains a list of signature words. Signature
+words are words are words which failed are not in at least 6
+dictionaries but Alan Beale thought should be included at the 6of12
+level (see README-orig). Examples of some of the sorts of words are
+included are:
+
+1. Words of the same category as other included words. An example is
+ the astrological sign "Cancer", which alone of all the astro-
+ logical signs fails to appear in 6 or more of the dictionaries.
+ Similarly added were the omitted holidays "Thanksgiving" and
+ "Valentine's Day".
+2. Vulgarities, sexual terms and insults. Some such words were
+ already included, but most of the source dictionaries were quite
+ squeamish about them. These words are very widely known indeed;
+ I hold that any list of "common" words which does not include the
+ infamous f-word is simply discredited thereby. Some may feel that
+ it would have been better to leave some or all of these terms
+ unmentioned. Nevertheless, the expression of blasphemy,
+ unwarranted contempt, and perverse lust, whether in words or in
+ deeds, is a very human trait. Suppressing the evidence of these
+ aspects of the human condition in our language makes no more sense
+ than excluding "leprosy", "gangrene" and "dementia", no matter how
+ unpleasant they may be to contemplate.
+3. Conventional conversational phrases so common as to be practically
+ invisible to native speakers. Examples are "thank you", "good
+ night", "uh-huh", "of course" and "gesundheit".
+4. Sports terminology, especially for football and baseball.
+
+
+signature2.txt description:
+
+The file signature2.txt contains inflections of irregular verbs not
+explicitly mentioned in 2 source dictionaries, such as "outfought" and
+"reheard".
+
+
+variants.txt description:
+
+The variants.txt file contains a subset of the words appearing in at
+least one of the 12 source dictionaries marked as variants or
+non-American. This list contains only the words which are spelling
+variants, words which represent different ways of saying the same
+thing (such as "henceforward" as a variant of "henceforth") and
+non-American words without a similar American form (such as "telly")
+have been removed. Each entry is followed by a tab, and a notation
+indicating which of several classes the word falls into. To describe
+the classes, it is best to do a little algebra. Let NV be the total
+number of non-variants, A the number of American variants, B the
+number of non-American variants, and V=A+B. Then the following
+annotations are to be interpreted as follows:
+
+#! - A >= B, NV = 0
+&! - A < B, NV = 0
+# - A >= B, V > NV
+& - A < B, V > NV
+#? - A >= B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV
+&? - A < B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV
+
+Simplifying, the choice between # and & indicates which variety of
+variant dominates, while ! and ? indicate a stronger or weaker than
+average agreement on variance.
+
+Additional notes on the list from Alan:
+
+ I should note a couple other characteristics of this file. First of
+ all, there are cases where spellings exist which are clearly
+ variants of one another, but where this is not recognized by the
+ source dictionaries. An example is the pair "levelheaded" and
+ "level-headed". These are clearly the same word, but none of my
+ sources lists both of them. I have chosen not to go beyond the
+ source dictionaries and put such words on the variants list, even in
+ obvious cases like this one.
+
+ I should also note that there are cases where the question of
+ whether 2 words are spelling variants or actually different words is
+ not easy to answer. For instance, consider the pairs
+ "lengthways"/"lengthwise" or "toward"/"towards". I've simply made
+ whatever decision seemed best to me in cases like this ("lengthways"
+ is a variant, "towards" is not), but recognize that any other
+ observer (who could bring himself to care) would be likely to
+ occasionally disagree.
+
+
+abbr.txt description:
+
+This file contains (almost) all the abbreviations and acronyms from
+the 12Dicts sources. Abbreviations which also in a list of common
+personal names (of about the same completeness as the ESL dictionaries)
+are marked with a tilda ("~") after it. There are still likely to be
+some abbreviations not marked with a tilda that match less common
+names.
+
+Additional notes from Alan:
+
+ For words containing upper-case, I [Alan Beale] had not recorded
+ whether a word was an abbreviation, so I was forced to remove the
+ non-abbreviations from the list by hand. Because of the need to
+ remove non-abbreviations, I limited myself to consideration of
+ upper-case words of 6 or fewer characters. It is possible that a
+ small number of acronyms or abbreviations longer than 6 characters
+ might have been missed.
+
+
+variant-notes.txt description:
+
+The file variant-notes.txt contains some additional notes on
+questionable variants sent to me when I pointed out that nought was
+not marked as a variant.
+
+
+2of12full.txt description:
+
+See README-infl
+
+
+2of4brif.txt, 3esl.txt, and 5desk.txt description:
+
+These files are identical to the orignal files in the 12Dicts package.
+See README-orig for more info.
projects / deb_pkgs / scowl.git / blobdiff