[sword-devel] Chinese PinYin, OSIS, SWORD and front-ends

[Chris Little]

Our ICU transliterators include a Pinyin transliterator, allowing the 
user to switch between Han and Pinyin. It wouldn't be especially 
difficult to write a filter to put the transliterated text in ruby.

The transliterator table is fairly good, I believe, and sometimes looks 
at context, not just isolated glyphs.

--Chris


On 9/30/10 6:24 AM, David Haslam wrote:
>
> This question is first addressed to the experts on OSIS markup, though it
> will also be of interest to front-end&  SWORD/JSword developers.
>
> Suppose we had a Chinese Bible module and wanted to include inline
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_Yin Pinyin  pronunciation markup for every
> ideogram, as an aid [say] to those learning the language.  This is worth
> pursuing, especially as Pinyin can be used for other languages besides
> Mandarin Chinese.
>
> What would be the recommended method to do this?
>
> One of my contacts wrote to me recently,
>
> Please take note that many Chinese words contains more than one phonetic
> sound and multiple meanings, the website I used to get the thing done
> (PinYin) is claiming 98% accuracy. If you have friends need to do other
> Chinese PinYin Bible I would be able to explain how to overcome the
> behaviour/weaknesses of the website  http://py.kdd.cc/ http://py.kdd.cc/
>
> He also provided the following text file contents ... (lightly reformated)
>
> The following Chinese characters were missing from the database of
> http://py.kdd.cc/ http://py.kdd.cc/
>
> 规(gui1)
> 矩(ju3)
> 争(zheng1)
> 吵(chao3)
> 闹(nao4)
> 院(yuan4)
> 囊(nang2)
> 喧(xuan1)
> 嚷(rang3)
> 裳(chang2)
> 娃(wa1)
>
> We've managed to overcome this by marking the missing character(s) and then
> using a hard copy dictionary to get the correct HanYuPinYin.
>
> ----
>
> The next question is addressed to both front-end developers and SWORD engine
> programmers
>
> One obvious way would be to have a separate SWORD module for the edition
> that is enhanced with Pinyin.
>
> Yet a more attractive idea would be to enhance the SWORD API such that
> Pinyin markup could be switched on or off as required, thus providing the
> possibility of only having one module to maintain.
>
> Then each front-end could eventually be enhanced to include a menu view
> option to Show/Hide Pinyin, just like they do for several other types of
> inline markup such as Strongs, etc.
>
> The method used to display the inline Pinyin could be at the discretion of
> the front-end developers. They might wish to use [say] superscripts in a
> different color than we use for other types of inline markup.
>
> Finally, as there is a one-to-one correspondance between each Chinese
> character and its Pinyin transliteration, this suggests the possibility that
> the Pinyin lookup could be done entirely within the SWORD API, thus not
> necessitating any inline OSIS markup within the module.
>
> Do these ideas and questions make good sense?
>
> Yours in Christ's service,
> David Haslam
>
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