# Better French and German stemming?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/better-french-and-german-stemming/236283
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [June 9, 2020, 8:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/better-french-and-german-stemming/236283 "2020-06-09T08:25:28Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@bkazez](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/bkazez)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2020, 8:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/better-french-and-german-stemming/236283/1 "2020-06-09T08:25:28Z")
Hello,
I'm using [cloud.elastic.co](http://cloud.elastic.co) to index metadata about German and French baroque vocal music. I need to treat inflected and uninflected forms as equivalent, so someone can search "schlummer" and find the lovely Bach aria "Schlummert ein."
I expected to have to add some baroque verb forms, but the built-in stemmers are missing even modern forms. What can I do?
Settings:
```
"analyzer_full_text_de": {
"filter": [
"straighten_apostrophes",
"lowercase",
"stop_de",
"german_normalization",
"stemmer_de",
"synonyms_de"
],
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "standard"
},
"stemmer_de": {
"name": "german",
"type": "stemmer"
},
"synonyms_de": {
"type": "synonym_graph",
"synonyms": [
"helfen, hilfen"
]
},
"analyzer_full_text_fr": {
"filter": [
"straighten_apostrophes",
"elision_fr",
"lowercase",
"stop_fr",
"stemmer_fr",
"remove_accents"
],
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "standard"
},
"stop_fr": {
"type": "stop",
"stopwords": "_french_"
},
"elision_fr": {
"type": "elision",
"articles": [
"l",
"m",
"t",
"qu",
"n",
"s",
"j",
"d",
"c",
"jusqu",
"quoiqu",
"lorsqu",
"puisqu"
],
"articles_case": "true"
},
"stemmer_fr": {
"name": "french",
"type": "stemmer"
},
"straighten_apostrophes": {
"pattern": "’",
"type": "pattern_replace",
"replacement": "'"
}
curl -X POST "localhost:9200/.../_analyze?pretty" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'
{
"analyzer": "analyzer_full_text_de",
"text": "schlummern schlummert gegrüsst grüssen grussen"
}'
```
=\> schlumm, schlummert, gegrusst, gruss, gruss.
I need schlummern/schlummert =\> schlumm and gegrüsst =\> gruss.
```
curl -X POST "localhost:9200/.../_analyze?pretty" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'
{
"analyzer": "analyzer_full_text_fr",
"text": "mal maux"
}'
```
=\> mal, maux.
I need maux =\> mal.
The other stemmers for these languages didn't work better. What else can I do?
Thanks!
Ben
---
### Author:  [@bkazez](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/bkazez)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2020, 8:33am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/better-french-and-german-stemming/236283/2 "2020-06-18T08:33:42Z")
To clarify the French issue: the French stemmers "light\_french" and "french" both work for many -aux examples like animal=animaux. The bug is that they do not understand mal=maux, which makes me worry that they're missing other common examples.
---
### Author:  [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2020, 10:01am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/better-french-and-german-stemming/236283/3 "2020-06-18T10:01:14Z")
May be you should open an issue [in Lucene](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE) as the `french` analyzer is provided by Lucene?
Otherwise, you can look at [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-snowball-tokenfilter.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-snowball-tokenfilter.html)? May be it will be better?
---
### Author:  [@bkazez](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/bkazez)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2020, 2:12pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/better-french-and-german-stemming/236283/4 "2020-06-18T14:12:32Z")
Thanks for the reply, @dadoonet. I tried the Snowball token filter but got the same results, I think because the French and German stemmers use Snowball behind the scenes. I'll open as issue in Lucene.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2020, 2:12pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/better-french-and-german-stemming/236283/5 "2020-07-16T14:12:39Z")
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