Maverick Upgrade Notes

There are no big changes when it comes to language support and language technology in Maverick compared to Mountain Lion. The few points to mention:

  • offline dictation is available for a select few languages (English, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German)
  • the speller language preferences have been moved from the Language & Text control panel to the Keyboard control panel

Changes to the development tools

The most important change is that XCode 5 under Maverick has no visible option for installing command line tools. Instead one must use a command line tool with a specific option: 

 xcode-select --install

The benefit of this is that one does not have to download and install the XCode package at all, which also means that there is no need to create an iTunes account just to get the command line tools.

HFST compilation issues

Another effect of changes to the compilation of third party tools is that the configure and make commands have to be slightly modified for Hfst to build: 

./configure --without-foma --with-unicode-handler=glib --enable-all-tools \
    CXXFLAGS="-I/usr/include/c++/4.2.1" LDFLAGS=" -stdlib=libstdc++"

Comments:

  • the first line lists the default configuration we use for the Divvun/GT infra
  • the second line is the additional parameters needed for Hfst to build on OSX 10.9 / Maverick
    • actually, the CXXFLAGS option is because of a bug in the OpenFST backend code(1) meaning that the only Maverick specific issue is the LDFLAGS option(2)

For general info on how to build HFST, see this page.

Summary of linguistic features/properties in MacOSX 10.9 / Maverick

  • Unicode fonts: yes (at least 3)
  • At least one font for every Unicode code point: no
  • built-in keyboard layouts: 71 languages (many languages have multiple inpu methods/keyboard layouts) (Jf Trosterud 2004, Trosterud i Nordlyd 2012)
  • User interface localisations: 33 languages (not extensible)
  • built-in spellers: 11 languages, but — using Hunspell .aff and .dic files — extensible to any language; ISO 639-2 languages will be presented by name (i.e. "sma" will be presented as South Sámi in the language of the user interface), other languages will be presented using only the language code (the non-suffix part of the .aff and .dic files). Example: abd.aff and abd.dic will be presented as abd, not as Manide.
  • speech synthesis: 28 languages
  • speech recognition: 8 languages

Footnotes:

1:

see https://bugs.launchpad.net/libmemcached/+bug/1216521/comments/2 for further details

2:

see http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/34692/mathlink-linking-error-after-os-x-10-9-mavericks-upgrade for further details