convincing Affinity Publisher spell check to learn possessive forms of names in very rare language

[Mark Overgaard]

I'm doing documents in Affinity Publisher that include some words in the Suri language of Ethiopia. The Suri are a very small people group with fewer than 35,000 members and there's no way this language will ever be recognized by Affinity. Fortunately, the character script is Latin and there are only two characters that don't occur in English: ɛ ("open e") and ɔ ("open o"). The documents are primarily in English and that's the spelling language that I have configured.

Fortunately, I seem to have been able to cause Publisher to learn the spelling of most of the words with these letters, as well as other Suri words that don't use these letters. But there are some stubborn exceptions. In the current document, they are all possessive forms of two specific Suri names. Both names use the open o character and Publisher refuses to learn the spelling of either name in possessive form: "Ngakɔshi’s" and "Ngaguyɔ's". Non-possessive forms of both names have been learned successfully. I haven't checked, but it's quite possible that my document doesn't currently use a possessive form of a Suri name that includes the open e letter.

How can I get Publisher to learn the possessive forms of these names?

Mark

[walt.farrell]

I am surprised it would be able to Learn either of the two names you showed. Can you provide a screenshot showing that? Or perhaps a sample document?

Also, what OS do you use?

[Mark Overgaard]

Thanks, Walt. Here's a screenshot showing one of the names in possessive form with spell check flag and in non-possessive form with no flag. Is this sufficient demonstration? I've attempted to request learning that spelling multiple times. I use APub 2.03 on MacOS Big Sur. I welcome your further comments.

[David in Яuislip]

I gave up with the Learn thing after I realised the palava to Unlearn
Instead, for writing in UK English, I created a folder here
C:\ProgramData\Affinity\Common\1.0\Dictionaries\en_GB
which contains en_GB.dic and en_GB.aff
Entries in these files supplement the main dictionaries in
C:\Program Files\Affinity\Publisher\Resources\Dictionaries\en-GB

My additional dic files have technical words in Dutch, Slovenian and Russian and everything works well

The advantage of this is that words added to the .dic can have the Hunspell suffixes which the Learn thing doesn't do
ie add
Ngakɔshi/M
Ngaguyɔ/M
into that .dic, the word is recognised and so are the posessives, this is the content

6
squorrox
tehnične
technisch
технический
Ngakɔshi/M
Ngaguyɔ/M
Note that the Publisher screenshot shows no errors for these only Erra which demonstrates that the spell check was on

This is the .aff
SET UTF-8
TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ

ONLYINCOMPOUND c

COMPOUNDBEGIN U
COMPOUNDMIDDLE V
COMPOUNDEND W

SFX M Y 1
SFX M   0     's         .

[walt.farrell]

50 minutes ago, David in Яuislip said:

Entries in these files supplement the main dictionaries in
C:\Program Files\Affinity\Publisher\Resources\Dictionaries\en-GB

I've always thought they replace those other files. Interesting thought that they supplement, instead. 

But that may be irrelevant for Mac, where spelling works differently.

[Mark Overgaard]

Thanks, David. I appreciate your additional comment as well, Walt. Walt: this looks like an excellent solution for my needs, but I'm hoping to get a bit more specific help.

Could I get somewhat more concrete guidance for my MacOS situation, regarding where and in what format I should create and install the supplemental dictionary? I've browsed a bit online, but haven't seen anything from Affinity about supplementary dictionaries, only replacement dictionaries. The documentation I've seen refers to a primary dictionary for a language. Since the primary language of my documents is English, I like very much the idea of having a supplement. 

I assume that Hunspell documentation covers the details of how to invoke its features, such as a /M suffix to signal coverage of possessive forms. Again with a brief look, I was able to retrieve a Hunspell document that covered those matters.

Thanks!

Mark

[walt.farrell]

10 hours ago, Mark Overgaard said:

I've browsed a bit online, but haven't seen anything from Affinity about supplementary dictionaries, only replacement dictionaries.

That's all I've ever seen, too. 

 

10 hours ago, Mark Overgaard said:

I assume that Hunspell documentation covers the details of how to invoke its features, such as a /M suffix to signal coverage of possessive forms. Again with a brief look, I was able to retrieve a Hunspell document that covered those matters.

But that is only meaningful if you are invoking Hunspell from your program. You're not. The Affinity application is the one invoking Hunspell and they don't let you tailor options that way.

And on Mac things work quite differently because it's really done by the spell checking function in macOS, as I understand it. So, you might look for macOS documentation on adding supplemental dictionary info.

[David in Яuislip]

When I played about with this a while back I was surprised that the additional dictionaries supplemented the main dictionary, had this not happened I would have copied the entire dic file and modified that
I'm sure I remember reading that the Mac system was based on Hunspell
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/402822/locating-the-file-in-which-a-dictionary-word-is-stored

however, if a text file that uses the Hunspell protocol can't be found then I think you're goosed. That link was using OSX, maybe Big Sur is different

In Windows under Preferences/Tools I can add additional dictionary folders, do you not have that on a Mac?

See if this video helps

 

Anyway, have a bump and hopefully someone from Serif will pick this up

 

Edited April 7, 2023 by David in Яuislip
video link added

[Mark Overgaard]

Thanks for your further comments, Walt and David. I've done a bit of additional exploration and summarize it here in case you have additional comments.

First, I found that ~Library/Spelling has a couple files 'en' and 'LocalDictionary', and that the first of those has most (or maybe even all) of the words for which I've invoked Learn in APub, including the example names I cited above (with their possessive forms). I'm guessing that the second file has words for which I've done the equivalent of Learn in MS Word (which is where I do most of my writing). Those are potentially useful discoveries that suggest that APub spelling correction on Mac indeed uses MacOS facilities.

Second, I'm a newbie on this forum. David, you said "have a bump and hopefully someone from Serif will pick this up." Is there something specific I can do to explicitly increase the likelihood of that? 

Third, David, my Preferences/Tools doesn't have that additional dictionary folder option.

Thanks again for you comments and suggestions.

Mark

[David in Яuislip]

First, I found that ~Library/Spelling has a couple files 'en' and 'LocalDictionary', and that the first of those has most (or maybe even all) of the words for which I've invoked Learn in APub, including the example names I cited above (with their possessive forms). I'm guessing that the second file has words for which I've done the equivalent of Learn in MS Word (which is where I do most of my writing). Those are potentially useful discoveries that suggest that APub spelling correction on Mac indeed uses MacOS facilities.

I'm flying a bit blind here but I would make a copy of the 'en' file. Assuming it contains

Ngakɔshi  )
Ngaguyɔ   ) which worked and
Ngakɔshi's )
Ngaguyɔ's  ) which didn't

I would delete them or do it officially through Publisher Unlearn
Then I would place the attached files, en_US.dic and en_US.aff, in the folder suggested in the video. I assume you're using US English, if UK then change US to GB

Second, I'm a newbie on this forum. David, you said "have a bump and hopefully someone from Serif will pick this up." Is there something specific I can do to explicitly increase the likelihood of that? 
A bump is just another post to raise its profile, you can always click the three dots, message top right, and report it

Third, David, my Preferences/Tools doesn't have that additional dictionary folder option.
I know that now so I dumped the image and replaced it with a video link

Keep at it, you're nearly there!

en_US.dic en_US.aff

[Mark Overgaard]

Thanks for your efforts, David! I have another mission to deal with right now, so it will be a little while before I re-engage on this topic. I'll come back with an update!

Mark