IRISH(5)

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💖 IRISH — flag format for Irish Ispell dictionaries 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to IRISH(5), the file formats manual page for the Irish Ispell dictionary flags ✨

🌈 NAME 🌈

irish — the flag format for Irish Ispell dictionaries, periodt 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Irish dictionaries for Ispell(1) support 3 prefix and 14 suffix flags. That's it, that's the whole roster, no cap 🔥

If you want the full detailed tea on how Ispell handles flags and capitalization, go read Ispell(4). This manual page? It only covers the flags you can actually use in dictionaries built with the gaeilge.aff affix file. Iykyk 🎀

The definitive meanings of the affixes live in /usr/lib/ispell/gaeilge.aff, but some of the reasoning and notes are right here, so stay with me 🫶

✨ the capitalization drama ✨

Irish has an unusual (unique?? 👀) capitalization rule, and it needs special handling. The prefixes for eclipsis are not capitalized, e.g. an tEarrach.

Here's the problem bestie: Ispell(5) assumes that in an uncapitalized word, the first letter may be capitalized. So Earrach would get incorrectly prefixed and capitalized as Tearrach 😭💀

Enter the hero: the file irish-prefixes.pl is a perl(1) script that preprocesses the wordlist and adds the correct capitalization 'by hand'. It will turn

Earrach/P

into

Earrach
tEarrach

etc. It strips off the E and P flags used for eclipsis and leaves any other flags intact 🧚

careful tho!! The word should be Capitalized in the the word list. If the uncapitalized version is left in the word list with the flag, it will generate incorrect words, so enter the uncapitalized and capitalized versions seperately 🙈

🌸 prefixes & suffixes, the whole vibe 🌸

One 'ordinary' prefix is handled by Ispell — H is used for aspiration of nouns, etc. (Verbs are handled separately, don't even worry about it 💜)

Twelve suffixes are used for handling regular verbs 👑 We use three suffixes each per conguation:

  • one listing all suffixes available to both aspirated and unaspirated forms
  • one listing aspirated forms only
  • one for unaspirated forms

So, for the verb mol for example, we have in the words list

mol/BC
mhol/BD

so the 'B' set of endings apply to both forms, the 'C' set to unaspirated only, and 'D' to aspirated only. This pattern is repeated for all four conjugations ⭐

Irregular verbs just appear in the list in toto. slay, no derivation needed 💅

Two other suffixes are currently defined: 'O' for Caolú (attenuation), and 'Q' for Leathnú (broadening) 🌈

💀 BUGS 💀

ngl, the dictionary is very small, and pretty incomplete 😭 Any help would be appreciated fr fr. Please mail additions and corrections to mckinstry@computer.org 🫶

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

Ispell(1), Ispell(5), english(5)

and that's the whole page bestie!! this one's from the File Formats Manual, dated 2002-04-11 — vintage but iconic 💖 mwah, go forth and spell Irish correctly 🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from