Re: Hyphens and apostrophes in words

Thanks, Carlo, I really appreciate your help.

> It is my understanding that changing just the .dat file is not enough,
> one has to recompile the dictionary from the (modified) sources.

If you mean "aspell create", I did that:
>> aspell --lang en create master ./variant < variant.dat
I didn't remake the whole English dictionary yet, but I'm not using it in my 
tests, only a tiny dictionary called "variant" with half-a-dozen words.
>> aspell check --master variant testaspell.txt

> I know by experience that the Italian aspell dictionary recognizes
> words with trailing apostrophes...

That was helpful and prompted me to look at the Italian dictionary.  But 
what I found was not nice.  There is nothing in "it.dat" about "special" 
treatment for the apostrophe.  There are no words in aspell's Italian 
dictionary with an apostrophe in them.  But Italian words ending in 
apostrophe are included in the dictionary MINUS the apostrophe, whether or 
not that is a valid word.  So it seems that the validation by aspell of 
Italian words ending in apostrophe depends on this very behaviour, which I 
deduce must therefore be the same in all versions of aspell - at least by 
default.

The question then reduces for me to whether there is an option of setting 
aside this default behaviour of aspell, so as to keep word-marginal 
apostrophes when breaking up text into words for comparison with the 
dictionary.

Ciarán Ó Duibhín.