Question

working on a Macbook pro with OS 10.6.
I’ve recently installed the package Aspell with the R package manager and it appears the install went just fine (no install errors). but when I try to use aspell I get the following error,

> aspell("love")
Error in getSpeller() :
  No word lists can be found for the language "en_US".

I also tried

> aspell("love", program = "/usr/local/bin/aspell")

I also installed aspell and hunspell seperately using GitHubs homebrew. When I did install aspell with homebrew I used

brew install aspell --lang=en_US

Is there somewhere I search on my mac to double check that the en_US language was installed? And if I do find that en_US is there, are there any suggestions as to why R is not finding it?

I’m a bit of a newbie when it comes to installation subtleties from sources files. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

A lot of time has gone by, but I recently had the same problem and the fix was:

brew remove aspell
brew install aspell --lang=en

I should have paid more careful attention when this flew by in the original brew install:

Dictionaries are not automatically installed, please specify the
languages for which you want dictionaries to be installed with the
–lang option, e.g: % brew install aspell –lang=en,es

For the following languages aspell dictionaries are available: af, am,
ar, ast, az, be, bg, bn, br, ca, cs, csb, cy, da, de, de_alt, el, en,
eo, es, et, fa, fi, fo, fr, fy, ga, gd, gl, grc, gu, gv, he, hi, hil,
hr, hsb, hu, hy, ia, id, is, it, kn, ku, ky, la, lt, lv, mg, mi, mk,
ml, mn, mr, ms, mt, nb, nds, nl, nn, ny, or, pa, pl, pt_BR, pt_PT, qu,
ro, ru, rw, sc, sk, sl, sr, sv, sw, ta, te, tet, tk, tl, tn, tr, uk,
uz, vi, wa, yi, zu