>a couple of verb charts and idiomatic expressions. It shouldn't be too hard >to modify an existing dictionary. Also, a mutations table would be nice: >how else would a learner know to translate "Ga i fwyta dy jips?" as >"May I eat your French fries?" A friend of mine had a devil of a time finding >daethpwyd and parodd. I assumed this last was from Parhau, which incident- >ally is not in Y Geiriadur Mawr's Welsh-English section, but it turns out >to be from peri. Funny you should mention this, because I've been updating my on-line lexicon to do exactly this (plus a little more, like listing irregular 3.s. of verbs and singular imperatives). The lexicon already contains gender and plurals in the English-Welsh section along with descriptions of how to distinguish between the possible Welsh translations for a word where applicable (thanks, Geraint Rhydychen!). It also does automatic un-mutation on lookup and can look up plurals, so that, for example, you could type in 'nghyd-ddigwydiadau' and it gives you the definition of 'cyd-ddigwydiad'. It also includes common expressions involving the words. For example, here's a part of the English-Welsh section: at - (prep.) wrth at all - (adv.) o gwbl at home - (adv.) gartre at last - o'r diwedd I haven't implemented the verb stem stuff yet, but when it's done, you should be able to type in 'elwais' and get the definition for 'galw' along with the explanation that the '-ais' suffix is for the 1.s. past tense. I've even got it set up so that I can run against the lexicon in spell-check mode (i.e., it will put out a list of all the words that are not in the lexicon). At the moment, this operation mostly points out the words that still need to be added to the lexicon, which is why I wrote it in the first place. I've been taking all the messages posted to WELSH-L that contain Welsh and passing the Welsh sections to this program to give me lists of words to add to the lexicon. I've also eased my life by having a couple of more tools: alphabetize - takes a lexicon file and a list of new words and inserts the new words into the lexicon in alphabetical order. It has a switch to specify whether to use the Welsh alphabetical order or the English one. transpose - Takes a list of definitions from one language to another and inverts it. I use this to augment the English-Welsh section automatically from the list of new Welsh-English definitions. (I then have to post-process to see if there are two definitions for the same word and part of speech and find out what the distinctions are.) >I suppose what we really ought to do is convince a professional like >Larousse or Langen-whosis to do this, but it'd be nice to have one published >in Wales. I'm making progress, and I think that what I'm doing has real promise, but I'M GOING TO NEED HELP! I have a real job to do, and this project is just a spare-time activity. If you are interested in helping in any way, please send me a message. In particular, anyone who would be willing to provide meanings for the new Welsh words would be a godsend (much of this could even be provided by a learner with a dictionary, though the verb stems etc. would eventually have to be added). --Mark