hoakley General, Language, Macs, Technology

Making more of Mojave’s language support: Nalaprop 1.0b6

If you have a Mac running macOS Mojave and are in the slightest bit interested in language – particularly more than your mother tongue – I think that you’ll find the new version of my free app Nalaprop of value.

Mojave has very sophisticated linguistic analysis built into it. Currently, it offers full support for seven languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and partial support (I think) for Turkish. Mojave has already been adding support, and is expected to continue to expand its linguistic horizons, possibly offering more than twenty in all.

As far as I am aware, at the moment Nalaprop is the only generally-available app which uses this support to the full. It does so by analysing text, which can contain as many different languages as you like, for the script, language, lexical class (part of speech), even the lemma or ‘root’ form of words which are declined.

This version has had extensive internal changes which now perform multiple analyses to tag each word in plain text (or imported RTF), so that you can then view that text coloured according to any of those types.

Open a text or Rich Text document, and it is automatically shown in plain text form at the left, and coloured by parts of speech in the centre. Click on the Parse button, and Nalaprop builds a word frequency list classified by part of speech (noun, verb, etc.).

Click on the MultiParse button, and each word is tagged in full. You can then view the text marked up in colour showing different:

  • scripts, e.g. Latin, Japanese, Hansa
  • languages, including many for which Mojave doesn’t have full support yet, such as Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic
  • lexical types, using either of two colour schemes
  • lemmas (roots), coloured according to lexical class.

Here’s a simple example: Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol

nalaprop10b601

You can save analysed text in coloured Rich Text format, and it supports printing, including to PDF files.

Because these linguistic features are only available in Mojave, I’m afraid that this app won’t run in High Sierra or earlier. It is notarized for your added security.

Nalaprop version 1.0b6 is now available from here: nalaprop10b6
and from Downloads above.