Re: Aspell-en license Once again.
On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 11:40:06AM -0800, Brian Nelson wrote:
> Alright, then consider this. Since a word list in a dictionary has a
> questionable copyright, it must be removed from a dictionary. Then,
> people notice some common words no longer exist in the dictionary, so
> they add them. Eventually, every missing word will be added back to the
> dictionary, so that the end result is identical to the original.
That’s quite an assumption; I seriously doubt it. Assuming that the
words removed were not in any of the other word lists used, then they
weren’t all that common. And assuming that words flow in at a steady
rate, a large number of new words will get added that weren’t in the
original, many of the words in the original won’t get suggested at all,
and I would expect that some of the words in the old word‐lists might
get suggested but turned down as unsuitable.
> Have you ever heard of two original novels independently written that
> were identical to each other? No, that's inconceivable.
Identical, no. But many hackneyed or strongly genre‐bound novels do turn
out increadibly similar to each other.
> But it's
> completely conceivable for two independently compiled dictionaries to be
> identical, or very nearly so.
I wouldn’t describe it as likely. The choice of words (do you add cwm?
bakress? ye? luculent? cromulent? boxen? virii? f**k? The spelling
without the astericks? I can see large debates on each of those words)
and the large selection mean that any two wordlists are probably going
to have significant differences in the set of words included.
--
David Starner - starner@okstate.edu
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--
A field where a thousand corpses lie.
-- Stephen Crane, "War is Kind"
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