Possibility of a MoE Southern Min (Taiwanese) dictionary?

R

rypervenche

Member
Hi there,

I use the Taiwan MoE Southern Min (Taiwanese) dictionary for my studies and think it would be extremely useful for me to have in Pleco. I am curious to know how possible it would be to get the dictionary into Pleco.

I feel that the dictionary itself would likely be along the same lines as the MoE dictionary was for you, however easy or difficult that was. https://www.moedict.tw provides files on GitHub (CC BY-ND 3.0) that can be parsed to create the necessary dictionary format for you. However, one aspect that might not make the a possible dictionary or would require work in the Pleco app itself and work for you, is that Taiwanese uses a different "pinyin" system, Tai-lo, which has been standarized by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. On top of that, it would also need a conversion to the extended Bopomofo/Zhuyin that can also be used with the language, just how Pinyin and Zhuyin work currently in Pleco, except it would be Tai-lo and Extended Zhuyin.

Is this dictionary something that could one day become a reality? Is it possible for me to be able to do some/a lot of the work with parsing and text manipulation and providing a dictionary in the correct format with the correct pronunciations?

If not, is this something that will be a possibility with the new 4.0 version?

If you need me to provide any further information, please let me know and I would be happy to.

Thanks in advance!
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
This would have to be done through a user dictionary for licensing reasons - those files are I believe distributed under non-commercial licenses - but it’s easy to build a dictionary using Tai-lo or POJ or other not-officially-Pleco-supported romanization systems in 4.0; all of our pinyin/Jyutping/etc processing is done through “text processor” objects which can be swapped out in a particular dictionary or field or index or search type with your own, and we’ve taken great pains to ensure that all of the features we use ourselves for pinyin etc (taking a long alphabetical string like zhonghuarenmingongheguo and breaking it into every possible combination of valid pinyin syllables e.g.) can also be done for an arbitrary romanization.
 
R

rypervenche

Member
Ahh, thank you both very much! I'll take a look at the links and see that is something that I can use in the meantime. I'm definitely looking forward to 4.0. Thanks so much for having stuck around for so long and provided such a necessary part of all of our Chinese language learning.
 
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