New German Spelling

In 1996, new spelling rules for German were approved by representatives from all German-speaking countries. For example, under the spelling reforms, Potential becomes Potenzial, Schiffahrt becomes Schifffahrt, and schneuzen becomes schnäuzen.

When the BASIC_LEXER attribute NEW_GERMAN_SPELLING is set to YES, then a CONTAINS query on a German word that has both new and traditional forms will return documents matching both forms. For example, a query on Potential returns documents containing both Potential and Potenzial. The default setting is NO.

Note: Under reformed German spelling, many words traditionally spelled as one word, such as soviel, are now spelled as two (so viel). Currently, Oracle Text does not make these conversions, nor conversions from two words to one (for example, weh tun to wehtun).

The case of the transformed word is determined from the first two characters of the word in the source document; that is, schiffahrt becomes schifffahrt, Schiffahrt becomes Schifffahrt, and SCHIFFAHRT becomes SCHIFFFAHRT.

As many new German spellings include hyphens, it is recommended that users choosing NEW_GERMAN_SPELLING define hyphens as printjoins.

See “BASIC_LEXER” for more information on setting this attribute.