[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Purely as a matter of interest, what is "linguistic compression"?

Linguistic compression was originally developed to save disk space and RAM. For example, most file compression methods use dictionary-based algorithms.
According to the Mobipocket website, Mobipocket/Kindle dictionaries use the Levenshtein distance algorithm to keep the file size down. For more information see this Mobipocket website article.

Originally Posted by tuxor

This is not support for morphology and/or inflections. This is support for synonyms, as I already mentioned above.

You obviously don't understand the difference between inflections and synonyms. For example, "brought" is an inflection not a synonym of "bring" and any dictionary software that allows users to find a headword by searching for an inflected form does support inflections.

Originally Posted by tuxor

Btw: If the OP had talked about simple morphology simulation using synonyms, he wouldn't have reported that this is not working with ColorDict because ColorDict has perfect support for synonym files!

No s/he did not. If you re-read his/her post you'll find that s/he mentions that searching for "worked" didn't bring up the entry for "work" and "worked" just so happens to be an inflection of "work." (Not once did s/he mention synonyms.)

Originally Posted by tuxor

And also the files you attached are simply in the StarDict format just like it is (indeed very well) documented here: http://code.google.com/p/babiloo/wiki/StarDict_format

That page explains the binary format used by StarDict, not the .babylon source format that I used.

Originally Posted by tuxor

I already talked about "simulating" morphology support using the synonyms feature of StarDict. And it is definitely insane simulating morphology support in this way whenever the language is a bit more complex - for Hungarian, Ancient Greek or even German the synonyms file would become incredibly large and you wouldn't even end up with "proper" morphology support.

The synonym file would be indeed a bit larger, but it doesn't significantly delay the lookup speed. For example, I created an Arabic-English StarDict dictionary with more than 80000 entries whose lookup speed is about the same as other languages on my ancient iPhone, even though most entries had on average 35+ inflection definitions.

You really may want to do some actual tests instead of purely relying on third hand information!