[Snowball-discuss] Suggestion: 'aci'(<-'at')

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 03:41:21PM +0100, James Aylett wrote:
> On 30 Mar 2014, at 18:27, Chris Hennick <christopherhe at trentu.ca> wrote:
> 
> > In English, the suffix 'acy' almost always corresponds to a cognate
> > ending 'ate' (piracy, privacy, literacy, accuracy) or 'atic'
> > (democracy, lunacy, trichromacy), so it'd be helpful if, like those,
> > it stemmed to -at. (The only word I can think of where this isn't
> > true is pharmacy, but I don't think any words derived from it would
> > be affected.)
> 
> I think these are also counter-cases:
> 
>  * conspiracy

While "conspirate" may not be an English word, "conspirator" is.

>  * episcopacy

It's a little obscure, but "episcopate" is cognate.

>  * fallacy
>  * lacy
>  * papacy
>  * racy
>  * supremacy
> I think the only two likely to cause problems would be l-acy -> l-at,
> r-acy -> r-at, which could be handled with a minimum length in the
> rule.

Also, I don't think you'd want to conflate "legacy" and "legate" (they
may come from the same Latin root, but the meanings in English are
rather different).

Cheers,
    Olly