There are 3 issues here:
a) processing a string of text and for example finding word breaks,
or seeking concordance lines
b) showing results on a screen and in printed form
c) sorting lists of words in alphabetical order.
processing a string of text
In a pc, each symbol is only a number such as 5,793 or 65, so in principle
any writing system can be accommodated. In WordSmith, recognising word-breaks
is done by assuming there is a space or some such between words. This
does not apply to all languages: in particular, Chinese and Japanese
do not usually mark word-breaks as English does using spaces (code 32).
That means that concordancing should work OK (since we are simply searching
for a string of characters) but word-listing is not possible (though
character-listing is).
showing results
You need a font which translates the numbers into symbols in pixels.
In WordSmith 3, the current version, a user can define their own alphabet
and own alphabetical order but there are problems in getting a Windows
pc to show things correctly.
WS3 uses alphabets which can be represented in one byte (a number between
0 and 255), a system which was usual in computers until recently. In
practice with such a one-byte representation system there needs to be
a "codepage" (a table of 256 characters) which contains the
symbols you need. I do not believe there is one suitable for Igbo but
I am not sure: presumably computational linguists in Nigeria will know.
The Windows Eastern Europe codepage covers some but probably not all.
WS4 (the one I'm working on now) can use the old one-byte system still,
but also 2-byte Unicode. This contains a very large number of symbols
indeed, many thousands of them. For Unicode you will need a Unicode
font. Check "Unicode" in a search-engine if this is new to
you.
sorting words
For this, you need a principle for saying whether (for example) an
Igbo sub-dotted o is to belong with the other o's or whether it should
come after z. WS4 now uses the sorting routines provided by Microsoft
instead of my own. The user has to specify which language they are using
and Microsoft's sort routines for English, Portuguese, Japanese, French,
Russian etc do the sorting. I do not think Igbo is included in the list,
but this would only affect the sorting and might not be important in
practice. The best thing to do is to tell WS4 that the language you
are processing is one which does sort acceptably for your data: this
might be Hungarian or Spanish, you will have to experiment to see.
No. I cannot legally supply you with a body of texts. But you can easily
build up your own using Internet resources. There are lots of corpora,
some of which are freely accessible, others can be purchased cheaply,
and others are extremely expensive. Try a google search on "test
corpus". Or visit newspaper web sites.