There's no way you can decide whether a word is English, German, French, Italian, or whatever other language based on the word alone. Think about it - if it was that simple, there wouldn't be reason to markup the words to aid the speech sofware - the software would already know.

You can't use a simple lookup in a database, there are words in English that exists in other language as well - which sometimes a totally different meaning. If you are going to automate this (and this isn't an easy task, people have been working on this for decades), you will have to look at the context. You will have to parse the sentences, and actually understand each word. And even then you might have problems with sentences like 'time flies like an arrow'.

I suggest that you research the literature on computarized linguistics, automatic translations, and speech software.

Abigail

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.