FAQ - Frequentely Asked Questions

The " Breton " entry does not show in the list.

Some old or foreign versions of the supported client software, although  fully compatible with the spell-checker, will not display the line " Breton " amongst the list of languages available, even if the installation of An Drouizig Difazier went well.

There is a simple reason : Microsoft still does not provide today, i.e. October 2002, an official " language ID " (LCID) for the Breton language. This is true at least for the Windows versions of the products (This LCID may exist on Macintosh). This identifier is a unique integer for every language of the world, dialect or sub-dialect. Standard French has the code 0x40C. English, 0x409.

This identifier is not defined for the minority languages of France (except the languages whose geographic domain goes out of the frontiers). However, It is defined for the majority of the minority languages of Europe, including Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Catalan, Basque, Welsh, Faeroe, Maltese, etc.

Microsoft is not the only responsible for this omission, probably, because these LCID are officially defined by the " Consortium Unicode " which references them under the ISO 639 norm. The RFC 1766 document is based upon this norm. RFC are documents which define protocols and standards of the Internet. The consortium could be waiting for a kind of official recognition of the languages by the countries legitimately responsible (which is still not the case in France for minority languages).

Now the only easily feasible trick to get a user friendly integration of An Drouizig Difazier is " squatting " an already existing LCID, whose choice is suggested by the client software. This is often successful, but it relies on the versions of which software are installed.

So An Drouizig Difazier squats the Catalan LCID whose code is 1027 (0x403). This squat is totally transparent for the user with the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or German versions of Microsoft Word 2000, 2002 (XP), Outlook 2000, 2002 (XP), Excel 2002 (XP), PowerPoint 2002 (XP) and Access 2002 (XP). This means that the setup program succeeds in replacing the " Catalan " selection by the " Breton " selection.
 
On the other hand, some foreign or older versions of the client software supported may not allow this trick. If you can not see the entry " Breton " amongst the set of languages, you will have to select " Catalan ". Luckily enough, this constraint has no bad side-effect on the spell-checker.

Can I use a Catalan spell-checker anyhow ?

As a matter of safety, An Drouizig Difazier will refuse to install if a Catalan spell-checker is already present on your computer. (cf. 1). Please, contact the author to get a version that squats another LCID than the Catalan one.

If you wish to install a Catalan spell-checker while An Drouizig Difazier is already present on your computer, then please uninstall An Drouizig Difazier, first.

An error is raised when starting the spell session.

Examples, amongst others because it really depends on your client software :

Answer: Your user dictionary BREZHONEG.DIC is not correctly set. Cf. Required settings for An Drouizig Difazier.

The " Add " button of the dialog box is greyed.

Answer: Your user dictionary BREZHONEG.DIC is not correctly set. Cf. Required settings for An Drouizig Difazier.
 

What about the other Breton spelling systems ?

Amongst the other spelling systems, we can list the following ones :

• The Skol Vreizh/Ar Falz system, inter-dialectal, " Etrerannyezhel ".
• The Skolveurieg system (CRBC/Emgleo Breiz, " falhuneg ").
• The " Vannetais " system (from the Vannes’s dialect) by Meriadeg Herrieu, Pierre Le Goff, Emile Ernault.

The decision on the choice of the spelling system has taken into account the fact that today more than 80% of the written publications and above all teaching are done in unified spelling system. For this simple reason, we do not plan to manage the other systems in future releases of this software. Focusing our efforts on implementing a simple grammatical analysis would be more valuable. See §8.

A correct word is not recognized by An Drouizig Difazier.

Based upon the amount of 20000 entries (this does not include the derivate forms, conjugated or mutated words), An Drouizig Difazier is still far from covering the content of the larger Breton dictionaries (monolingual or bilingual) such as An Here’s, Favereau’s, or the most classical Al Here/Al Liamm’s by Roparz Hemon/Ronan Huon.

Do not hesitate to send a list of unrecognised words, spelled in accordance with the unified spelling system, (please provide at least a list of 20 words), with their respective kind, gender, … and precise which reference has been used. They will be included in the next maintenance release of the spell-checker.

Some weaknesses already detected.

• All the diminutives (ti ® tiig) have not been generated.
• All the exclamatives (buan ® buanat !) have not been generated.
• Words that start with gou- will always have a mutation in c’hou- (never ou-).
• The two forms -iñ and -añ of the infinitive verbs can be correct although An Drouizig Difazier will know just one.
• The two forms -er and -our of the job names can be correct although An Drouizig Difazier will know just one.
• The two forms -el and -ek of adjectives can be correct although An Drouizig Difazier will know just one..
• The plural forms in -ion (equivalent to -ien) have been omitted for composed words or irregular plurals so far.
• Trouble with the hyphen in certain circumstances. ex: Ur match Frañs-Amerika.

Some ideas to go further ...

• The grammar analysis.

In a future release, it is planned to add a simple grammar analysis that could identify mutation mistakes.

Other tools that could be added in the future :

• A dictionary of synonyms.
• The engine that provides suggestions could use phonetic along with syntax information.
• A “verbatim” dictionary Breton/French.
• A thesaurus.