Taiwanese Pronunciation Feedback

[taikongren]

I'm a bit confused by the labels for words that have a different Taiwanese pronunciation: what I'm assuming is supposed to be the Mainland pronunciation is labeled GY (which I'm guessing means 國語, which generally refers to Taiwanese Mandarin?).

On a related note, it seems like the Taiwanese pronunciation is often also listed under the GY label, leading to some misleading entries:

Please let me know if I'm misinterpreting this screen.

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, the TW/GY thing is because we're worried 大陸 might offend somebody. (we have gotten annoyed emails on the subject of "mainland" in the past) But maybe we shouldn't shy away from DL since the original Cross-Straits dictionary this data comes from uses it. The reason for GY rather than PTH is because we also use that to differentiate it from Cantonese - in the same header, if people have enabled both that and TW - and our sense is that the majority of users interested in Cantonese would lean towards GY.

The issue with 突然 here is that it's getting that GY tu2ran2 pronunciation from MOEDict - which only does Taiwan pronunciation - and we haven't yet worked out a way for a dictionary to only supply Taiwan pronunciation without it screwing up our search merging. So at some point we're either going to fix that problem or add non-Taiwan pronunciations to MOEDict. (since there are so few other dictionaries out there with Taiwan pronunciation - or at least ones that we can license - my inclination is to go with the latter for now and revisit the problem later; also, MOEDict has a lot to offer users outside of Taiwan too, so making it more readily searchable for them has its own benefits)

 

[taikongren]

I wonder if it's possible to conditionally change the labels depending on what readings are enabled? Not sure if that would make things more confusing though.

E.g. It shows "TW" and "PTH" if only Taiwan/Mainland pronunciations are enabled, but "PTH" switches to "GY" if Cantonese is also enabled.

 

[mikelove]

It's possible but I do think it could make things more confusing, yes - we change it now when PY + ZY are enabled without any other reading systems to label them as PY and ZY, but in that case they're both giving you the data from that underlying GY field, just in a different system.