GAROWE, Somalia Aug 3 (Garowe Online)- Almost thirty seven years after Somali   became a written language, a Somali –born engineer in Finland has developed a Somali language spell checker.

Mohamed Ibrahim Mursal has,in cooperation with Professor Kevin Scannell  a mathematician with natural language processing expertise, made use of an open source software to develop the spell checker.

T he spell checker can be used on OpenOffice  and   Firefox applications ."We have compiled more than 17,000 words so far, and the list of words keeps increasing as people who are using have a facility in the spell checker to add or suggest a new word.    A group of editors check the correct spelling of new words suggested by users and add to the list of words in the spell checker."

Engineer Mursal has further enhanced the fe atures of the  spell checker . It can now downloaded on a memory stick that contains OpenOffice and Firefox  applications.

"There is a website for the spell checker  ( higgaad-saxe, in Somali). It is Open Source Somalia . The Somali spell checker will be beneficial to journalists, and those using Somali language for education, administration and as a second language .     

Mohamed Ibrahim Mursal is project engineer at Research and Development Unit of the University of Savonia, Finland.

Source: Garowe Online

Garowe Online