The arubawords table holds the Aruba Papiamento spelling list derived from Vocabulario Ortografico di Papiamento, commonly known as the Buki Blau (Buki Blauw). That book is the official Aruba orthography reference, published by the Departamento di Enseñansa Aruba and approved by the Aruban Parliament in 2018. Their “Busca palabra” app is also based on this list.

This page describes only the conversion pipeline from the source file to the word list loaded in the database — not the Papiamento ↔ Papiamentu comparison screen at /aruba.

Source file

The revised CSV in the repository is doc/Buki_Blau_Conversion/papiamento-lista-buki-blau-revised.csv. Lines use the export format NNN;palabra with optional inline variants in square brackets and occasional slash spellings for Aruba vs Curaçao forms.

Conversion steps

Scripts build_arubawords.rb and build_arubawords.sh in the same directory run the same seven steps:

• 1. Strip leading record numbers (123;).
• 2. Expand inline [variant] brackets onto separate lines.
• 3. Sort alphabetically with LC_ALL=C sort -u.
• 4. Remove trailing parenthetical glosses such as (v.) or (riu).
• 5. Split slash variant pairs (abao/abou → two words).
• 6. Drop junk/header lines (for example #;palabra).
• 7. Keep the first occurrence of each word while walking the sorted list.

The result is doc/Buki_Blau_Conversion/arubawords.txt — currently 16,200 unique words. Migration 20251031180210_reload_arubawords_from_file loads that file into the arubawords table (one word per row).

To rebuild locally, run ./build_arubawords.sh from doc/Buki_Blau_Conversion/.