About the "Italian Supplement" for Excalibur.
The "Italian Supplement" spelling dictionary contains 184,000 Italian
words and occupies 1.6 Mb on the hard drive. It isn't useful on its
own because it doesn't contain basic vocabulary. However it can be
used to supplement the 62,000 words in the "Italian Dictionary"
provided by Paolo Matteucci. The two together give Excalibur access
to a total of 246,000 Italian words.
The "Italian Supplement" is not 100% accurate. Users who need maximum
accuracy should stick to using just Paolo Matteucci's "Italian
Dictionary". However people who need the extra words will find the
"Italian Supplement" useful in spite of its having some defects.
Installing the "Italian Supplement" for use with Excalibur.
Put the "Italian Supplement" into the folder in which you keep
Excalibur. If you prefer to store it somewhere else, put an alias for
it into the folder in which you keep Excalibur.
On Excalibur's Dictionary menu, choose Open Dictionary.... Navigate
to find the "Italian Supplement', select it, and click Open.
If you want the "Italian Supplement" to be opened automatically when
you launch Excalibur in future, choose Preferences.... from the
Options menu. In the Preferences window, check the box called Load
currently active dictionaries. Click Save Now.
About this revision.
The "Italian Supplement" is a reduced and partly-revised version of a
larger list of about 277,000 words which has been available at the
Excalibur site since early in 1997. There were some problems with
that very large list.
- It didn't contain any accents. Words that ought to be written with
an accent appeared in their unaccented form. The list has been
searched for words that ought to have an accent, and so far as
possible the accented form has been substituted. It wasn't
practicable to search for every word that ought to bear an accent.
Almost all the accented parts of the future tense have been
corrected, and almost all words that should end in -t\`a. Some
accented parts of the passato remoto tense have been corrected or
added. Other words have been corrected if they were found, but the
result is patchy.
- There were too many non-Italian words. Modern Italian is adopting
lots of non-Italian words, especially in the fields of sport,
popular music, and information technology. However the list looked
as if it included almost every foreign word that the original
compiler had come across, and the result seemed excessive. The list
was searched for words containing j, k, w, x, or y, and for words
ending with u or with a consonant. Some of them are genuine Italian
words, or words that have become a recognised part of modern
Italian. Most of the "good words" have been left as they were, but
many foreign intruders have been deleted. It wasn't practicable to
search for every non-Italian word. The list wasn't searched for
foreign words ending in a, e, i or o, so the "Italian Supplement"
probably still contains some non-Italian words.
- There were too many words starting with A and B. This resulted from
the previous merger of two separate word lists. One of those lists
covered the whole alphabet and contained 245,000 words; the other
covered only the letters A and B and contained 32,000 additional
words. Most of the 32,000 extra "A-B" words have been removed from
the "Italian Supplement". They are available as a separate
collection. If you want them, look for "Italian A-B words" on the
Excalibur site.
- It contained numerous words that were already included in Paolo
Matteucci's "Italian Dictionary". These words have been deleted
from the "Italian Supplement".
Hyphenated words and Roman numerals have been deleted. A few spelling
mistakes were found and corrected, but the list didn't seem to contain
many mistakes. The main reference work used was Il Grande Dizionario
Garzanti. The accents are generally as shown in that work.
It is nice to have the opportunity to express appreciation to Rick
Zaccone and Rob Gottshall for the indispensable program Excalibur, to
Paolo Matteucci whose "Italian Dictionary" for Excalibur is invaluable
in so many ways, not least in helping with this revision of the
"Italian Supplement" list, and especially to Jacek Iwanski. His
shareware program "Verbs & Nouns Lookup" handles bilingual
dictionaries and verb tables, does word-for-word translation, and is a
spellchecker too. A recent innovation in that program has made it
practicable to remove defective and surplus words from the "Italian
Supplement". If you'd like more information about his software, visit
his home page at <
http://users.netmatters.co.uk/dandaforbes>, or write
to him at <
[email protected]>, or to me (see below). An
English-to-Italian translation module is expected to become available
in the near future.
Anyone who wants to revise the "Italian Supplement" further is welcome
to do so.
Adrienne Forbes
email:
[email protected]
September 1998
