#215 French Words With ΠLigature

[Kevin Atkinson]

From a private email:

From: Michaël Le Barbier

Dear French Wordlist Producer,
Dear Aspell French Word List Package Maintainer,

I recently noticed that the ASPELL program agrees that the words

SOEUR, COEUR, BOEUF, OEIL, FOETUS, OENOLOGIE, OESOPHAGE, etc.,

are correctly spelled. This program uses the french word list by
Rémi Vanicat and Christophe Pythoud

ASPELL is wrong, because in these words, the `OE' should be replaced
with the `Œ' ligature (ISO8859-15 code BC). This ligature is sometimes
regarded as an aesthetic effect but is really a special spelling
feature on its own.

For a more detailed discussion on the use of the `Œ' ligature, see:

Jacques André. _ISO Latin-1, norme de codage des caractères
européens?_, Cahiers Gutenberg no.25. (french)

WWW: http://www.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/GUTenberg/publicationsPDF/25-andre.pdf

There is also a short discussion about the `Œ' in Grévisse (§90 c), a
popular french reference for grammar and spelling.

I think this subject is also of interest for the maintainer of the
ASPELL maintainer because in some environment where the ligature `Œ'
is unavailable (a.f.a.i.k. for locale settings that do not use UNICODE
neither ISO8859-15 as charset), it might be suitable to write SOEUR
instead of SŒUR, etc.; thus ASPELL has to handle the wordlist
adequately according to the locale settings.

I wish to express my gratitude to you for your efforts in producing
quality software usable by anyone, I hope this small remark will help
you in this.
--
Best Regards,
Michaël LB

[Kevin Atkinson]

This issue has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/GNUAspell/aspell/issues/422