Languages

Language-specific Elasticsearch analyzers in Sigmie — English, German, and Greek stemmers, stopwords, lowercase, and umlaut normalizers.

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Sigmie ships purpose-built analyzers for English, German, and Greek. Each language has its own stemmers, stopword lists, lowercase normalizer, and (where appropriate) script-specific normalizers.

To use a language, pass an instance to language() on the index builder, then chain the filters you want:

use Sigmie\Languages\English\English;
 
$sigmie->newIndex('articles')
    ->language(new English)
    ->englishStemmer()
    ->englishStopwords()
    ->englishLowercase()
    ->create();

language() returns a builder typed to that language, so the chained methods are language-specific and discoverable.

English

use Sigmie\Languages\English\English;
 
$sigmie->newIndex('articles')
    ->language(new English)
    ->englishStemmer()
    ->englishStopwords()
    ->englishLowercase()
    ->create();

Available filters

Filter Purpose
englishStemmer() Standard English stemmer.
englishPorter2Stemmer() Porter2 (Snowball) stemmer. More aggressive than the default.
englishLightStemmer() Lighter stemming — keeps more of the original form.
englishLovinsStemmer() The Lovins algorithm.
englishMinimalStemmer() Minimal stemming for high-precision use cases.
englishPossessiveStemming() Strip trailing 's and '.
englishStopwords() Drop English stopwords.
englishLowercase() Lowercase tokens.

Pick one stemmer per analyzer — they overlap. Porter2 is the standard choice; the light/minimal variants help when stemming reduces precision too much.

$sigmie->newIndex('articles')
    ->language(new English)
    ->englishPorter2Stemmer()
    ->englishPossessiveStemming()
    ->englishStopwords()
    ->englishLowercase()
    ->create();

German

use Sigmie\Languages\German\German;
 
$sigmie->newIndex('artikel')
    ->language(new German)
    ->germanNormalize()
    ->germanStemmer()
    ->germanStopwords()
    ->germanLowercase()
    ->create();

Available filters

Filter Purpose
germanStemmer() Default German stemmer.
germanStemmer2() Alternate German stemmer (variant 2).
germanLightStemmer() Lighter stemming.
germanMinimalStemmer() Minimal stemming.
germanNormalize() Normalize umlauts and ß.
germanStopwords() Drop German stopwords.
germanLowercase() Lowercase tokens.

germanNormalize() is usually worth including — it folds ü→u, ö→o, ä→a, ß→ss, so queries match regardless of how users type umlauts.

Greek

use Sigmie\Languages\Greek\Greek;
 
$sigmie->newIndex('arthra')
    ->language(new Greek)
    ->greekLowercase()
    ->greekStemmer()
    ->greekStopwords()
    ->create();

Available filters

Filter Purpose
greekStemmer() Greek stemmer.
greekStopwords() Drop Greek stopwords.
greekLowercase() Lowercase Greek tokens (handles σ → ς word-final form).

greekLowercase() does more than ASCII lowercase — it handles the Greek-specific final-sigma form. Use it instead of the generic lowercase() for Greek text.

Multi-language indices

Per-field analysis lets you mix languages in one index. Define one analyzer per language-specific field:

use Sigmie\Index\NewAnalyzer;
use Sigmie\Languages\English\English;
use Sigmie\Languages\German\German;
 
$props->text('description_en')
    ->withNewAnalyzer(function (NewAnalyzer $analyzer) {
        $analyzer->tokenizeOnWordBoundaries();
        // language-specific filters via separate builder
    });

For most cases, simpler to keep one index per language and search across them:

$sigmie->newSearch("articles_de,articles_en")
    ->properties($props)
    ->queryString('Tür door')
    ->get();

See also