[sword-devel] pinyin in Chinese sword module

[Matthew Patenaude]

>Thanks for helpful clarification.
>
>The look-up concept I was trying to describe would always be
unidirectional.
>(Ideogram  =>  Pinyin)
>
>Although Pinyin can also be used as a text entry method, I did not consider
>that as a feature needed for any of the SWORD front-end applications.
>
>David

That would be correct, actually. Pinyin lookup for a Bible module would be
essentially meaningless. There are only around 400 total pinyin
possibilities to divided among all the many characters (found in the Bible
alone, not to mention the language), so it would be meaningless to look up a
word for study usage in a module by using Pinyin.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but your intent is for those of us who might
not recognize a character, to be able to look up (and also to show, via a
show/hide pinyin function) a character within the text. Right?

Probably 70% or less of Chinese characters represent a single pinyin + tone
spelling (for lack of the results of a thorough study - I would say that is
a generous estimate). Those are the easy ones. For the rest of them - 1
character = either pinyin + several tone choices or/and several pinyin
choices + their respective tones. These are the difficult ones, and they
have to be checked. One comes to mind immediately that has one pronunciation
as an adjective ("e" + 4th tone), and another pronunciation ("yan" + 4th
tone) as a noun. To make matters ugly, not only do both these words show up
in the CUV(S), there are quite a few single verses where they both show up.
Same character, two completely different pronunciations. This kind of thing
has to be watched for. The poor foreign preacher reading his carefully
prepared text and not getting the above character correct is going to get
some pretty funny looks.

Some context may be necessary for lookup. In the above example, the
character usually occurs within a phrase (a Chinese 'word' sometimes has
more than one syllable, though each syllable is one character and can itself
be one word - it's convoluted...), and the different pronunciations show up
within different phrases. So if you see it combine with one of one set of
characters, you know it is pronounced "e4", and with one of a different set
of characters it is usually pronounced "yan4", and so on.

Hope that helps...

Matthew
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