Re: Changing dictionary while flyspell-buffer is running

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

On Thu, Feb 21 2019, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de>
>> 2. If you set multiple dictionaries, you
>> will get false negatives since a typo in one language might be 
>> a word
>> in another language.  Depending on the set of languages used, 
>> this could
>> be a real problem.
>
> It could be.  IME, it never is, as of the 3 languages I write 
> fluently
> and frequently each uses a different script, so no false 
> negative is
> ever possible.  Even when using several languages that use the 
> same
> script, say, Latin, the accented letters usually prevent false
> negatives.

That really depends on the languages involved. Dutch and English, 
for example, use very few accents, and even German, which has ä ö 
ü and ß, doesn't use these letters that often. I would suspect 
that most Western-European languages use so few accents that 
confusions of the type Titus refers to are quite possible.

> Finally, guessing a language is also not 100% correct, 
> especially when
> short phrases from some language are inserted into text written 
> in
> another language, something that happens a lot in email
> correspondence, for example.

The method Titus' package employs is quite reliable, IME. (I'm a 
user of his package). Sometimes, when the relevant text is very 
short (a single line), German is recognized as Dutch, but usually, 
it works extremely well. (I have it configured for Dutch, German 
and English, which, due to these languages being closely related, 
are probably not easy to tell apart.)



-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments