My understanding is that soundex was developed by several mathemeticians at MIT in the 1950's. The idea was to create a way for similar sounding family names to be grouped together reguardless of how they might be spelled, and since english was the language their world spoke, the algorithm tends to work best with names found in the northeastern United States. I believe there are different variants on the algorithm, but they should produce the same binary number for names that sound the same. i.e. Smith and Smythe should produce the same number, or if not numbers very close to one another. I would expect poor results with the Swedish language, perhaps if the mathemeticians had come from Minnesota. I have personally seen it produce very bad results from Oriental and Italian names. > -----Original Message----- > From: Gustav Wiberg [mailto:gustav@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 10:43 PM > To: PHP General > Subject: SoundEx in swedish? > > > Hi there! > > Soundex works with diffrent kind of pronounciation... but > does it work with > Swedish language? > Anyone have experience of this??? > > /G > @varupiraten.se > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
