Ergane 1.0 is a multilingual dictionary programme for Windows. It was develop-
ed on a 486 with 8 MByte RAM but may run in other configurations as well.

In order to run Ergane needs at least Windows 3.1. The programme does not need
any fonts other than a few of the ones included with Windows 3.1

This programme is freeware and the data are free of copyright. There are no
restrictions on the use of either programme or data.

The executable file is ERGANE.EXE which must be accessible by Windows; it
needs the following third-party software (included in the ZIP-file) to run:

BRUN300.DLL (Visual Basic 3.0 Runtime module)
CMDIALOG.VBX
MSOLE2.VBX

The most appropriate location for these files would be the Windows system
directory (they may already be installed there for some other Visual Basic
application).

All other files, containing the necessary data for Ergane can be put in either
the same directory as the programme or in a separate data directory. In case
of a separate directory, the environment table of DOS should contain the va-
riable ERGANE that indicates the search path. 

E.g.: ERGANE=C:\ERG

It's best to keep all Ergane files (except the the aforementioned three) in a
special directory because there are more than 400 of them.

Ergane 1.0 can do the following things:

1. Translate single words and short expressions from one language to another
by using Esperanto as an intermediate language.

E.g.

Dutch           Esperanto       English

aannemen        adopti          adopt
		akcepti         accept, receive, take
		supozi          assume, presume, suppose

2. Find (near) synonyms.

E.g.:

Dutch           Esperanto       Dutch

aannemen        adopti          aannemen, adopteren
		akcepti         aannemen, accepteren, ontvangen
		supozi          aannemen, onderstellen, veronderstellen

3. Apply limited pattern searching.

E.g.:

English         English

h@t             hat, hit, hot, hut
zoo*            zoo, zoologist, zoology

4. Help with learning foreign languages. It can choose a random words from
language X and the user is then asked to type in the equivalent in language Y. 


Ergane 1.0 has the following features:

1. Vocabularies (varying in size from just a few entries to 42,000) for the
following languages:

Dutch, Frisian, Modern English, Old English, German, Danish, Dano-Norwegian, 
Swedish, Icelandic, Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, 
Modern Greek, Classical Greek, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Polish, Czech, Serbo-
Croatian, Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, Maltese, Turkish, Swahili, Yoruba, Ma-
lay, Indonesian, Mandarin (*), Thai, Lao, Japanese (*), Papiamentu and Sranan.

(*) Romanized

From time to time enlarged vocabularies for these languages and vocabularies
for new languages will be issued.

2. Additional phonetic transcriptions in IPA for English, Thai and Lao.

3. An export module for generating trilingual (X-Esperanto-Y) dictionaries in
ASCII and several 8 bit character sets (CP 437, Windows International, Latin 
1 and many others). 

4. Language information (geographical distribution, family tree).

5. Keyboard configuration files that can be modified for use with non-US key-
boards (French, Russian, etc.)

6. A concise user manual (UMANUAL.WRI) and a technical manual (TMANUAL.WRI).

 
If you have any information about bugs in the programme or errors in the 
vocabularies you can send an email to:

gvwilgen@worldaccess.nl

or a letter to 

Gerard van Wilgen
Tweede Brandenburgerweg 50
3721 CJ Bilthoven
the Netherlands

If you happen to know Esperanto you are also invited to send me contributions
involving missing words from the vocabularies or even missing languages (pro-
vided that they can be written using the current version of Ergane's character
set).


Gerard van Wilgen


