周 vs 週 (TW usage)

[外国赤佬]

I'm interested how this works in the TW standard (don't care about the other standards at the moment). When to use which?

週 seems to have the meanings of week, year, anniversary and such. Things related to time. So one would use it to write 週末、週歲、週年 and such, but would use 周 for words like 周圍. Correct? Also, it seems like sometimes both are OK.

The TW standard is not that well documented, especially in the West. Many respectable Western dictionaries, such as ABC, give completely wrong traditional variants, e.g. 游戲 instead of 遊戲 (and all other words containing 遊), 惡心 instead of 噁心, etc. Maybe these dictionaries are using the HK standard, I've no idea.

Since I'm not in Taiwan, I don't have much data to work with. Only MoE's dictionary and Taiwanese IMEs (a pretty good way to find out which characters are used to write a word, most modern IMEs have pretty big databases).

[AYRYZIGER]

Good question.

As for me, I think they are used interchangeably in many words. However I tend to use the character 週 more than the other, since 周 is also used in words related to "circumference", "completeness", "circuits", "aid", "provision" and "Chou Dynasty".

On the other hand, 週 is mainly used for words related to the week and other revolving cycles of time.

[OneEye]

AYRYZIGER's post matches up with my own experience.

But I wouldn't say the dictionaries necessarily give "wrong" traditional "variants" (OK, I'm pretty sure 游戲 is wrong, but 惡心 isn't), unless you consider the MOE standard to be the standard of correctness. By that token, they also give "wrong" pronunciation. That's not really how it works though. In the Taiwan standard, 期 is pronounced qí, but you'll be hard-pressed to find that in a dictionary that wasn't published in Taiwan. CC-CEDICT lists it, although in the definition like this: (TW pr. qí). But you won't find 星期 listed as xīngqí even in CC-CEDICT.

Even in Taiwan though, you'll see 異體字 literally everywhere. A really common one is 化粧室 for 化妝室. Japanese variants are fairly popular too, and you'll sometimes even see の in place of 的.

[外国赤佬]

The Taiwanese do often use different readings because it's, after all, a different standard. Some readings are more archaic, some have probably deviated after the split. See the list here.

By the by, there's also Dr.Eye. Another good online resource for figuring out the TW standard.

[bubokribuck]

e.g. 游戲 instead of 遊戲 (and all other words containing 遊), 惡心 instead of 噁心, etc. Maybe these dictionaries are using the HK standard, I've no idea.

Except that they really aren't. People use 游 instead of 遊 and 惡 instead of 噁 because they have taken some characters from the Simplified Chinese and didn't know in Traditional Chinese, we use different characters for those terms.