Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The Hidden Thrills of Spell-checking

I'm on day twelve of spell-checking a massive amount of Ikizu translation. It's not the most exciting job, but I have a secret passion for finding those little accidents that have slipped through the cracks. You know, when an extra vowel has snuck into a word, when the prefix for the perfective got confused with the extremely similar one for the past tense - exciting stuff like that.

This evening as I was (quite successfully) combining watching The Voice with spell-checking, I laughed when I saw a list of four words next to each other. I showed Andrew my screen and joked, "Think any of these might be wrong?" (If you missed the intonation there, it was the pattern that meant, "Can you believe the mistakes I find? There's no way all four of these words are correct!")

See what I mean?

abhahirɨ
abhahiri
abhahiiri
abhahɨɨrɨ

But guess what? I checked them all, and they are all right! And we're not just talking a little tweak of a different suffix on the same root, but like totally, completely different words! How exciting is that late in the evening of day 12 of spell-checking?

In respective order, they mean:

he should take them
angel
relative
he gave them

COOL!. I love Ikizu.

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