New Pleco dictionaries released

[OneEye]

At the risk of stealing mikelove's thunder, I wanted to go ahead and post that the "early access" dictionaries are now available. These include the 古漢語大辭典, the Longman Advanced Chinese Dictionary, the Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine, and a free Chinese Medical Terms List. You can read the announcement and instructions here. That link also contains explanations of why these are called "early access" versions (for instance, it looks like some rare characters in the 古漢語大辭典 aren't included yet).

The 古漢語大辭典, unfortunately, has only simplified characters in the definitions and citations, and mikelove has said they're not certain if they'll ever fix that. I understand that it would be an enormous undertaking, so I'm not too worried about it, but it's something to be aware of if you buy it. Headwords work in either simplified or traditional, which is nice. Otherwise this dictionary is pretty awesome, as expected, and will be well worth the money so I don't have to lug paper dictionaries around with me.

I'm also really liking the Longman dictionary so far. Really thorough definitions from what I've looked at. I believe it's the only non-classical dictionary I own that lists Jupiter (木星) as one of the possible meanings of 歲, for example.

I have no need for the medical dictionaries, so I haven't taken a look. Maybe someone with more knowledge of such things could post about them.

Great work, mikelove and the Pleco team!

[skylee]

I am glad that the Longman Dictionary 《朗文中文高級新辭典（第二版）》 has been included. It is one of my favourite Chinese Dictionaries (I own two hard copies). Does the Pleco version cover Cantonese pronunciations?

[mikelove]

Thanks for posting this - wouldn't be thunder-stealing in any case since these were mostly dictionaries that people were already aware of.

I am glad that the Longman Dictionary 《朗文中文高級新辭典（第二版）》 has been included. It is one of my favourite Chinese Dictionaries (I own two hard copies). Does the Pleco version cover Cantonese pronunciations?

Thanks! Actually, IIRC, it was one of your posts here that led us to investigate it originally - with Taiwanese publishers continuing to give us the cold shoulder, we're excited about anything we can find with robust traditional character support, and in this case there were a lot of other nice features too.

Cantonese pronunciation is missing right now since the "old" version of our app that we're releasing this for doesn't know what to do with Cantonese; we'll be adding it in once we've added support for that to our app. However, the dictionary itself only includes Cantonese readings for single characters - multi-character headwords only come with Mandarin - so if we want to support Cantonese in every entry (and we do), we'll need to add it ourselves; we've already done this for a few other dictionaries, but it's a bit trickier with this one because Longman are (quite rightly) very protective of their trademark and don't particularly want us mucking around with their dictionary data any more than we have to.

[OneEye]

I am glad that the Longman Dictionary 《朗文中文高級新辭典（第二版）》 has been included. It is one of my favourite Chinese Dictionaries (I own two hard copies).

It really is great. The more I use it, the more I like it.

I really wish the Taiwanese could get their act together when it comes to this kind of stuff. It would be so awesome to have one of the Far East dictionaries or even the 國語辭典 on Pleco, even if only to check for pronunciation differences. Or even something like the 台華雙語辭典 (though I don't think I should get my hopes up for there to be enough of a market for a Hokkien dictionary of any sort).

[imron]

It really is great. The more I use it, the more I like it.

Do you have the Guifan Cidian also? How would you say it compares?

[OneEye]

Yes, I do. I like that the Guifan demonstrates how meanings evolved using arrows, which the Longman doesn't. Some of the entries in the Longman are more thorough (like 歲 mentioned above). I like how Longman has separate entries for 異體字 (with the definition "X的異體字"), but that may just be me. I like that it's in traditional characters, because I'd say I work with traditional material 95% of the time, and you still see the occasional conversion error in Guifan entries. The formatting of the Longman is much nicer, IMO. It isn't as comprehensive in its coverage though. For instance, 世界杯/盃 (盃 is more common in Taiwan) isn't listed in Longman. But 盃 is (杯的異體字), while it isn't listed in Guifan at all. I also like that under character entries, the Longman lists a few words under each definition (so does the Guifan of course, but I like the formatting in Longman better), like

杯：1）一種盛液體的器皿：水杯 / 酒杯。2）杯子形狀的錦標：獎杯 / 金杯。3）量詞：一杯牛奶。

I haven't noticed too much use of the character being defined in the actual definition (unless, like above, it's already been defined earlier in the entry), which is really nice. The entry for 杯 in Guifan starts out:

杯：1）[名] 杯子

Worst possible way to define a word. Well, second worst. The worst goes to 王力's entry for 方 in 古漢語常用字字典:

方：1）方。《荀子.....

And so on. I'm not really sure how defining 方 as 方 is going to help me understand how it's used in the 荀子 quote, but there you go.

Anyway, all in all I'd say it makes an excellent and worthwhile complement, but not a replacement, for the Guifan.

[mikelove]

Formatting will likely improve in Guifan soon, FWIW - once the paperwork (finally) comes through for the second edition we'll have nice clean XML data for that, as we already do for Longman, and that should enable considerably more intelligent formatting. (our glorious new type design should help on that front too)

But I'm afraid that 異體字 will probably soon be absorbed into the entries they link to, assuming Longman doesn't object - they already have been merged like that in GHYDCD. We've got a new system now that lets us point multiple entries at a single definition, with the entry you originally tapped on showing up as the official headword but the other variants listed below, and we're planning to use that in all of our dictionaries - really important for our new merged search system so that you don't end up with lots of duplicate results for the same word. (it's annoying to type in a particular Pinyin string and have half of the results merely be pointers to the other half)

[OneEye]

That all sounds fine to me!

[imron]

@OneEye, thanks, that's a good comparison.