Tō Reo – A Māori Spellchecker

[shever73]

A nice synchronicity here, I was only checking Māori words today because The Guardian's cryptic crossword was set by "Pangakupu" (which means, logically enough, "crossword"). This crossword setter always includes a hidden Māori word or phrase in the puzzle.

[mydriasis]

I see you've posted about Maori stuff a couple of times. I want to congratulate you, this is really, really great. Thank you for working to preserve a language and culture! You're presenting resources that are tough to find, and that's an amazing thing.

[NelsonMinar]

Wow neat! There's a great collection of Māori-made technology for te reo Māori. I'm thinking also of Te Hiku Media's work building a Māori speech recognition system: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/te-hiku-media-maori-speech-ai/

[polemic]

My favourite is PAHU! https://pahu.maori.nz/ - a lorem ipsum generator in te reo Māori.

[Titan2189]

https://www.maoridictionary.co.nz/ This is the dictionary I use most often

[hk__2]

I get "Sorry, something went wrong. If this error persists, contact us." every time I type something.

[firstbabylonian]

Thanks — there was a cookie-related bug, which should now be resolved.

[ks2048]

I can't type anything in the text area on Firefox. Works in Chrome (macOS).

[XeO3]

Yeah, that element should be 'textarea' instead of 'div' or at least the 'contenteditable' should be true.

[joemi]

Also doesn't work in Firefox on Windows but does in Chrome.

[firstbabylonian]

Thanks, Firefox support is in the works.

[stephantul]

This is very nice and important. We need more tools for small languages.

[timonoko]

Is this true that Maaori is crapped by Ænglish spelling? In all other languages long vowel is just two wovels, not some stupid umlaut on top.

[timonoko]

Yes, says ChatGPT:

The Māori word "Māori" can be transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as:

/ˈmaːɔɾi/

Here’s a breakdown:

  /ˈ/ – indicates primary stress on the first syllable
  /m/ – a voiced bilabial nasal, like the "m" in "man"
  /aː/ – a long open front unrounded vowel, similar to the "a" in "father," but held longer (the macron indicates length)
  /ɔ/ – a mid-open back rounded vowel, like the "o" in "thought"
  /ɾ/ – a tapped or flapped "r," similar to the quick "r" sound in Spanish "pero"
  /i/ – a close front unrounded vowel, like the "ee" in "see"
  This transcription represents the most common pronunciation of the word "Māori."

[TRiG_Ireland]

It's certainly not an umlaut. Nor yet is it a trema, which is what you probably mean. It's a macron, which is commonly used to mark long vowels.

[neallindsay]

excellent use of a Punycode domain

[yardstick]

I was going to disagree with you, because most kiwis have no idea how to write the special o (myself included), so they’d end up typing toreo.nz instead.

Which as it turns out, redirects to xn--treo-l3a.nz anyway.

Nice!

[scanny]

Awesome work, love to see the effort on the technical front of bringing a language into broader use!

[pabs3]

Is the source code of this somewhere?

[addaon]

Slightly off-topic, but it would be nice if HN interpreted punycode in link descriptions. Especially given that the links go through a redirect, which means that the browser status bar sees them as part of the query and not the domain, so the browser's own interpretation of punycode never gets applied.

[zahlman]

Seeing the Punycode link is actually a security feature, because it means you aren't tricked into visiting, say, pple-06g.com (apple with a Cyrillic a).

[lpapez]

You can easily write a Tampermonkey Userscript for that. As HN doesn't update the CSS that often, should be quite low-maintenance solution.

[samatman]

Someone always says this when a punycode link shows up.

I'm glad they don't. What you see? That's the link. It's what the browser sends, it's what DNS resolves: it's the link. Displaying it as Unicode is just a display option, and it's one which opens up all manner of mischief through confusables.

It's a hacker culture choice, and it's one I appreciate.