[Snowball-discuss] Another Porter2 question: "able" sample seems wrong

[Martin Porter]

yes, I think your last point is effectively the right way of looking
at it. 'e' is in R1, but 'e' itself is preceded by (immediately
preceded by) 'abl', which is not a short syllable.

The idea of all this is to distinguish (for example), ap and ape, so
ap and aps stem to ap, and ape, apes, aping, aped stem to ape. It is a
distinction for the "short syllable" case.

(Incidentally, I am somewhat quoting from memory here, not having
access to my Linux machine, but I think I've got this right.)