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Alternate Spelling Conventions

This appendix describes the alternate spelling conventions that Oracle Text uses in the German, Danish, and Swedish languages. This chapter also describe how to enable alternate spelling.

The following topics are covered:

• Overview
• German Alternate Spelling
• Danish Alternate Spelling
• Swedish Alternate Spelling

Overview

This chapter lists the alternate spelling conventions Oracle Text uses for German, Danish and Swedish. These languages contain words that have more than one accepted spelling.

When a language has more than one way of spelling a word, Oracle indexes the word in its basic form. For example in German, the basic form of the ä character is ae, and so words containing the ä character are indexed with ae as the substitution.

Oracle also converts query terms to their basic forms before lookup. As a result, users can query words with either spelling.

Enabling Alternate Spelling

You enable alternate spelling by specifying either GERMAN, DANISH, or SWEDISH for the alternate spelling BASIC_LEXER attribute. For example, to enable alternate spelling in German, you can issue the following statements:

begin
ctx_ddl.create_preference('GERMAN_LEX', 'BASIC_LEXER');
ctx_ddl.set_attribute('GERMAN_LEX', 'ALTERNATE_SPELLING', 'GERMAN');
end;

Disabling Alternate Spelling

To disable alternate spelling, use the CTX_DDL.UNSET_ATTRIBUTE procedure as follows:

begin
ctx_ddl.unset_attribute('GERMAN_LEX', 'ALTERNATE_SPELLING');
end;

German Alternate Spelling

The German alphabet is the English alphabet plus the additional characters: ä ö ü ß. The following table lists the alternate spelling conventions Oracle Text uses for these characters.

Character	Alternate Spelling Substitution
ä	ae
ü	ue
ö	oe
Ä	AE
Ü	UE
Ö	OE
ß	ss

Danish Alternate Spelling

The Danish alphabet is the Latin alphabet without the w, plus the special characters: ø æ å. The following table lists the alternate spelling conventions Oracle Text uses for these characters.

Character	Alternate Spelling Substitution
æ	ae
ø	oe
å	aa
Æ	AE
Ø	OE
Å	AA

Swedish Alternate Spelling

The Swedish alphabet is the English alphabet without the w, plus the additional characters: å ä ö. The following table lists the alternate spelling conventions Oracle Text uses for these characters.

Character	Alternate Spelling Substitution
ä	ae
å	aa
ö	oe
Ä	AE
Å	AA
Ö	OE