Origin of Characters information

buckdale

秀才
One thing I really would like in a future release of PlecoDict is information about the origin & development of each character from its earliest forms to the present. I find this a very useful aid for remembering characters.

Wenlin has a fair bit of information for many characters, but it isn't available for handhelds (pocket pcs, mobile phones like ASUS P750 or Palms etc). There is an online dictionary at http://www.chineseetymology.org by Richard Sears showing oracle, bronze & seal characters related to a specified character.

A particularly useful etymological dictionary for learning characters is by Rick Harbaugh and is displayed online at his website http://www.zhongwen.com. It is also published in paperback form by Yale University Press and sold by Amazon. Perhaps it might be possible to offer this dictionary as a PlecoDict option.

Or perhaps, like the Chinese 21st century English Chinese dictionary, an etymological dictionary from China might be a good option.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The zhongwen.com dictionary unfortunately we tried but failed to license (had a nice conversation going but then for some reason he just stopped responding to my e-mails), but we've gotten a lot of interest in general in adding some sort of character origins dictionary so we'd certainly like to license one from somebody. And preferably in English since it's something that would potentially be very useful to beginners - given the amount of scholarly debate on the origins of many characters, a database like this is probably more useful as a learning aid than as an actual reference.
 

buckdale

秀才
Mike, it is a pity that your negotiations through zhongwen.com fell through. I've found another dictionary that is considered by the experts to be far more accurate yet gives useful info for learners. This is An Illustrated Chinese Etymology Dictionary,edited by XIE Guanghui, Beijing University Press 2000 1st Edition.

China Books describes it thus:
Discusses the basic meanings of Chinese characters with illustrations and includes over 1000 commonly used Chinese characters. Each headword is provided with representative ancient character patterns, including oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions and small seal characters, that not only show original meanings but also describe the origins and evolution of characters.
(http://www.chinabooks.com.au/ChinaB...ails&records_to_display=50&this_book_number=9).

The downside, relative to zhongwen.com, is that it only deals with "over 1000 characters" and therefore presumably under 2000.

Perhaps once PlecoDict version 2 is released, it might be worth contacting Xie Guanghui (谢 光辉),who probably is located at Jinan University, Guangzhou (as in 1996 this was his work address according to his previous book) or Beijing University Press.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Interesting - I'm a bit concerned about the small number of characters, but once you've learned 1500 or so they start to get easier anyway, so this certainly might be worth investigating.
 
Perhaps you should recontact the zhongwen site, let them see your new Pleco 2 screenshots, etc. Especially with the economy as it is, there might be something beneficial for both of you.

At least try to get linked on his main page, since he says he over 10,000 visitors a day. He has other sites, such as Chinese Pod, etc. listed.

An amusing but irrelevant point: I wanted to get to his linked version of "Mao's Sayings", which is listed right above "A Madman's Diary". but the two links are mistakenly linked each to the other...

I've written to his published email address about the cross link mistake.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I hate getting e-mails asking to be put on Pleco's links page (to the point where I'm probably doing away with that page altogether in the site redesign), so I'm not inclined to pester people with those sorts of messages myself. It's tough to license content from people with websites anyway, because they tend to view us as potential competitors - I've contacted several other website operators about content licenses and been turned down specifically because they think they might like to develop their own handheld software someday (or at least mobile-friendly versions of their sites). So print publishers are generally much more promising for us.
 

buckdale

秀才
Mike, any chance of getting a licence to include wenlin's origin info on at least the handheld version of PlecoDict (they might baulk at licensing the dictionary for your coming pc version)?

Another possibility might be to contact sinolingua, china--they have published heaps of books on character origins--all in print at the moment and not electronically published, eg Chinese Characters A Systematic Approach, and The Origins of Chinese Characters. Sinolingua's website is http://www.sinolingua.com.cn, email address for the first book is hyjx@sinolingua.com.cn, and their address is 24 Baiwanzhuang Road, Beijing 100037, China.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I haven't actually asked Wenlin about it, but I think in general the market is better served by having a wider variety of content available - we've already got a situation where we use the same C-E dictionary, and soon we'll also be using the same character component / stroke order data, so while they're lovely people to do business with and we'd be happy to work with them on another license, it seems like in this case we might want to try a different title. Product diversity is a good thing, especially with reference works - if one of them gets too widely-used it can start to seem much more authoritative than it actually is. (witness CEDICT)

The problem with a lot of origin-of-characters titles actually is that they really aren't organized like dictionaries - "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" by T.K. Ann is one I'm fond of, for example, but it reads almost like a regular nonfiction book.
 

buckdale

秀才
mikelove said:
The problem with a lot of origin-of-characters titles actually is that they really aren't organized like dictionaries - "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" by T.K. Ann is one I'm fond of, for example, but it reads almost like a regular nonfiction book.

Agreed, but I was thinking it might be worth contacting Sinolingua through the contact info given in my previous suggestion, and ask them what title(s) they suggest. 80% of characters divide into a phonetic & a semantic component, so a character dictionary that did this and little else, would be quite useful. If, for the simpler semantic only characters & phonetic loan characters, it traced the origins & meanings through the seal inscriptions, bronze inscriptions and turtle shell & oracle bone inscriptions that would be a bonus.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well I guess I could ask them, but the easiest thing would probably just be to go bookstore-hunting - I've found a couple of the dictionaries we use that way. (even here in New York there are a couple of places in Chinatown with excellent selections of dictionaries, though they cost about 4x what they do in China)
 
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