##Creissels' wordlist parser and searcher.

This project aims to salvage Creissels' 1996 wordlist. In particular

• The original wordlist is in an outdated MacOS text file format,
• Creissels' narrow transcription scheme, while preserving every important aspect of the words, is unusable in its present form, and
• The wordlist is not searchble for Setswana words in plain text.

This project translates the transcription -- taking advantage of modern Unicode &c -- and provides a simple interface to perform plain text searches.

I wrote this program to allow me to further my personal Sesotho research (descriptions of the tones of individual words in Sesotho are near-impossible to come by, and Setswana is a reasonable proxy). Perhaps somebody else might also find it useful.

###Technical details ####Requirements

In order to compile the source, you need GHC. Development was on GHC 7.8.3, but it seems to compile with 7.6.3 as well.

You also need cabal-install. Development was on 1.10.

Haskell libraries will be fetched automatically and installed in a sandbox, so you don't need much to compile the source besides a working GHC and cabal-install.

You need the dev versions of the readline library installed on your system. This requirement makes the software incompatible with Windows. Sorry. Maybe it will work under Cygwin/MinGW. I don't know.

####Configuring and installing

Be sure to update your Cabal index before starting by running cabal update. If cabal --version produces a number lower than 1.10, then you should also run cabal install cabal-install afterwards.

To configure the application, run ./configure, then run cabal install to build it.

The main executable will be found under bin/creis.

To remove all the files produced by the build process (including the main executable), then run ./clean.

####Text file had to be processed slightly in order to work:

• Encoding had to be set to UTF-8.
• Mac LF line endings had to be converted to *nix CRLF.

The original file (from the Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary) is available here: Tswana.Creissels1996.txt