January 27th Dictionary Releases

[goldyn chyld]

@goldyn chyld - yeah, we're keeping the arrows too since once we fix that bug we plan to continue using them for pinyin; the tags for pronunciation are a temporary accommodation to work around the bug. We'll keep using the tags in place of the other star/triangle icons, but I want to fit the pronunciations into our standard pronunciation variant handling system going forward (so they can, for example, show up at the top of entries too) and that necessitates something minimal like arrows.

Just pushed a GF update with fixes for those, thanks - word wrapping bug can't be fully fixed without an app update but it should at least not trail off anymore (it'll just go right up to the edge), 'i'/'j' search issue was actually a serious indexing bug we wanted to fix ASAP to avoid leaving anyone with a worse GF than they had before.

Thanks for the quick update. I still wonder what the GF publishers will say regarding the absence of the 土豪 entry's slang sense, though, since the rest of the neologisms mentioned in that NY Times article I posted on previous page *are* included in the 3rd revision.

By the way, I found another glitch in GF:

 

[mikelove]

@Alexis - nope, TCD's content is a superset of TL's so there's no reason to keep TL around.

@goldyn chyld - I'm rather curious about that one myself (and yeah, bit of odd formatting there but not unusual in special cases like this - sort of thing that we suss out after a few releases from user feedback and add to our notes to avoid repeating when we convert GFCD 4/e)

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

@ACardiganAndAFrown - 111,844 total entries at the moment. But no need to regret, just write Apple for a refund if you're not happy with your purchase.

Sorry, what I meant was unique from HDC or other dictionaries, the majority of things I saw looked mostly like copies of HDC both definition and example wise.

I *don't* want to ask for a refund, I would rather know XHD's strong points.

 

[Shun]

Sorry, what I meant was unique from HDC or other dictionaries, the majority of things I saw looked mostly like copies of HDC both definition and example wise.

I *don't* want to ask for a refund, I would rather know XHD's strong points.

I wondered about that, too, so I found the following explanation from Baidu Baike: Xiandai Hanyu Da Cidian builds on the Hanyu Da Cidian (2001) with all non-Modern Chinese definitions removed. As you may know, Hanyu Da Cidian's coverage spans all three millennia. Xiandai Hanyu Da Cidian can be considered the most extensive Modern Chinese reference book, and it's intended to be an authority for the internal standardization of Putonghua.

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Original text:

《现代汉语大词典》是上海辞书出版社继 《汉语大词典》之后2006年隆重推出的又一重要文化工程，列入新闻出版署所制定的“九五”国家重点图书的出版规划。全书共收单字条目（含繁异体 字）15，000余条，多字条目10万余条，凡850万字，可以说是目前现有的现代汉语词典中规模最大、收条最多、信息量最丰的大型语文工具书。

《现代汉语大词典》严格遵照国家有关文字规范标准规定及《出版物汉字使用管理规定》，用字规范科学，为社会用字树立了权威标杆，为推进汉字的标准化和规范化不遗余力。上海辞书出版社是首批可以出版各类辞书的12家大型出版社之一。

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

I wondered about that, too, so I found the following explanation from Baidu Baike: Xiandai Hanyu Da Cidian builds on the Hanyu Da Cidian (2001) with all non-Modern Chinese definitions removed. As you may know, Hanyu Da Cidian's coverage spans all three millennia. Xiandai Hanyu Da Cidian can be considered the most extensive Modern Chinese reference book, and it's intended to be an authority for the internal standardization of Putonghua.

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Original text:

《现代汉语大词典》是上海辞书出版社继 《汉语大词典》之后2006年隆重推出的又一重要文化工程，列入新闻出版署所制定的“九五”国家重点图书的出版规划。全书共收单字条目（含繁异体 字）15，000余条，多字条目10万余条，凡850万字，可以说是目前现有的现代汉语词典中规模最大、收条最多、信息量最丰的大型语文工具书。

《现代汉语大词典》严格遵照国家有关文字规范标准规定及《出版物汉字使用管理规定》，用字规范科学，为社会用字树立了权威标杆，为推进汉字的标准化和规范化不遗余力。上海辞书出版社是首批可以出版各类辞书的12家大型出版社之一。

Interesting. Thanks.

I have seen words, too, that are not in HDC: 侧扁 for example.

Just wondering how many unique words there are.

 

[Shun]

Interesting. Thanks.

I have seen words, too, that are not in HDC: 侧扁 for example.

Just wondering how many unique words there are.

You're welcome! Maybe a couple of thousand new words (total number of entries: over 111,000) have been added to the XHD, though they may well be added to the Hanyu Da Cidian, as well, when a new one comes out. I read that Hanyu Da Cidian even contains modern slang terms, so anything that's Hanyu will be added.

 

[mikelove]

@ACardiganAndAFrown - yeah, much of that content is also in HDC; to be honest, the main reason we launched that dictionary was to provide a cheaper / smaller alternative to HDC, we didn't expect a lot of people would be buying it along with HDC. (a bit like if we'd launched Tuttle Learner's after Tuttle Chinese Dictionary)

I've now added a note to the catalog description for XHDC to the effect that if you already own HDC you might not get that much extra value out of this one, and in your case you probably should just write to ask for that refund. Sorry for the lack of clarity on this initially.

 

[etm001]

I just wanted to say that I was super pleased to see the Cross-Straight dictionary. The ABC proverbs dictionary looks great too.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

 

[Abun]

Totally different topic: I for some reason am unable to download any dictionary updates atm (posting this here though because I could download the very first patch of updates following the release and the app itself hasn't updated since). Concretely, the updates do show up in my list of updated dictionaries (in my case, that's the Guifan and CC-Canto updates from 26/01 as well as the Cross-Strait one from 01/30), however none of the download buttons (including the "download all" and all individual ones) do anything. Reloading the list does not solve the issue.

btw, I'm using v3.2.23 on Android (v4.3 on a Samsung Galaxy S3)

 

[mikelove]

Where are you located? Can you download demo versions of non-updated dictionaries? This sounds like an issue connecting to our download server.

 

[Abun]

Before 1949 and after the fall of the Qing dynasty, 國語 and 注音 were created by the nationalist in mainland China to replace the common speech used in the Qing dynasty. After 1949 when the communist took over they modified 國語 to be more similar to the Beijing dialect and then called it 普通話 as well as replacing 注音 with 拼音. 國語 and 注音 went with the nationalists to Taiwan.

國語 in Taiwan has the same connotations as does 普通話 in China. That is, "Mandarin" is the official spoken language of the country as opposed to any other language or spoken dialect. It is not a contrast between non-standard and standard forms of spoken mandarin.

That's exactly what I meant. Both 國語 and 普通話 are created as official standard languages which have a similar standing as RP in English: They are what people think of as the most correct/sophisticated way of speaking Mandarin, but in reality you will rarely hear "pure" 國語 or 普通話. The only place where I am used to hearing more or less pure 國語/普通話 is the news, and even there I often hear regional influences, especially in Taiwan where most people are familiar with, for example common Southern Min words so they don't pose a comprehension issue. In the PRC, use of local expressions seems much less common, I guess because people's language backgrounds are so much more varied due to the hugely larger area.

I have looked for some examples for regional Taiwanese expressions which I consider part of "Taiwanese Mandarin" but which don't appear in the MoE 國語 dictionary. And indeed, I have to concede that a lot of what I consider regional expressions have been included into the 國語 standard (e.g. 打拼 < 閩南 phah-piàⁿ 拍拚). But this appears to be mostly the case with calques from local language (i.e. words which are pronounced with a Mandarin reading of the characters instead of the original pronunciation. A lot of words which are used with their (in some cases Mandarinized) local language pronunciation in Mandarin discourse on the other hand are not listed. Examples are 阿公 and 阿嬷/媽 for "grandma/grandpa" or the word kiū (usually spelt with the English letter "Q"; the 閩南 source word khiū is spelt as (食 next to 丘) in the MoE's 閩南 dictionary), which denotes a gummi-like texture in foods, like grilled squid or tapioca perls for example. All of these are definitely loanwords, but they are perfectly normal to use in Mandarin and (at least to me) don't feel like code-switching.
Naturally, the same can be said about regional words in colloquial PRC Mandarin (i.e. 普通話 != PRC Mandarin just like 國語 != Taiwan Mandarin), but of course it's hard to find supra-regional commonalities over such a vast area.

That being said, it seems the "Taiwanese Mandarin" and "Chinese Mandarin" in the title does refer to the standards, i.e. 國語 and 普通話 respectively, so I think there would be no ground for factual contesting if those names were chosen as labels.

 

[Abun]

Where are you located? Can you download demo versions of non-updated dictionaries? This sounds like an issue connecting to our download server.

I'm located in Germany and no, demo version's don't work either. As for connection issues... I tried it in different locations over the last few days (at home, different nets at the university) and the first try after connecting to a network will frequently cause a connection error message to appear (can't tell the exact wording right now because I can't change the network atm). Subsequent retries then simply don't do anything.

 

[JD]

@Alexis - nope, TCD's content is a superset of TL's so there's no reason to keep TL around.

I'm not seeing a TL as a perfect subset of TCE. I tried a couple arbitrary searches for water, green, and star. TL has more example sentences in the entries for both than TCE..

Any ideas why? (See pictures)

 

[mikelove]

The examples are still there, we just moved them to other entries to more accurately reflect how they appear in the original dictionary - the one for 星 is now under 行星 and the one for 水 is now under 自来水. (they'll still show up in SENTS regardless)

 

[goldyn chyld]

Another rendering glitch in GF:

 

[mikelove]

@goldyn chyld - thanks.

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

Do any of the German dictionaries contain Swiss German words?

 

[mikelove]

I don't believe so, no - quick check for "Grüezi" and "Widerluege" doesn't turn up anything.

 

[goldyn chyld]

A suggestion for GF: any chance you could do something to distinguish the "注意" part of the definition from the rest of the entry? Either just make the 2 characters "注意" in different color or underline them (or something like that), or make the entire "注意" part appear in different color so that one could easily spot it? I attached a screenshot.