Romanizations for Hokkien / Hakka / Wu / Sichuanese

[mikelove]

We've decided we need to ship some sort of official support for a couple of Chinese topolects in Pleco 4.0 - rather than expecting users to go through dozens of pages of reference documentation to figure out how to do so themselves - and I'm looking for some advice on which romanization systems to default to and how to use them.

 

Hokkien: it seems like Tâi-lô is the predominant system, and for the most part we can approach it like we do Mandarin and (Yale) Cantonese - search with suffix tone numbers and display with diacritics. Does that make sense?

 

Hakka: there seems to be more active competition here, but since, as with Hokkien, the Taiwan MOE seems to publish a lot of material for this and it generally seems like most of the interest in working with Hakka languages is coming from users in Taiwan, we should probably follow their 臺灣客家語拼音方案 scheme, correct? The Wikipedia article on that shows floating diacritic marks after syllables, but then the actual MOE Hakka dictionary uses superscript numbers, 2 per syllable, which to me look tidier - would the latter system likely be acceptable to most users? And for searching, would we want to let you enter zero or two digits and ignore suffixes of just one digit?

 

Wu: again more competition but I get the impression that the most favored system at the moment is Wugniu? And that between sandhi chains and other complications online dictionaries generally don't bother to make the tones searchable? Is it worth the trouble to implement a sandhi notation system like Wiktionary's? (it seems like they've got about the only open-source dictionary data for Wu anyway)

 

Sichuanese: it seems like the system to use here is Sichuanese Pinyin, which again we can treat like regular Pinyin but with more syllables and superscripts instead of diacritics?

[Tomsima]

This is great news. Your approach to Sichuanese is in line with what I have in my textbooks and dictionaries. Are there any plans for offering more Mandarin romanisation systems? GYR would be very useful, I have had it as a user dictionary for a long time but would really appreciate having it sit up top for quick reference. 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

 

Yes, both GR and Wade-Giles are supported in the current 4.0 beta.

[anonymoose]

On 5/13/2024 at 1:03 PM, mikelove said:

Wu: again more competition but I get the impression that the most favored system at the moment is Wugniu? And that between sandhi chains and other complications online dictionaries generally don't bother to make the tones searchable? Is it worth the trouble to implement a sandhi notation system like Wiktionary's? (it seems like they've got about the only open-source dictionary data for Wu anyway)

 

I'm definitely not an expert, but I did live in Shanghai for about 10 years and made an effort to learn Shanghainese. All I can say is that there is so little material out there for learning Shanghainese, that to me at least, there does not seem to be any romanisation system that stands out from the others. Having said that, this is from materials, mainly for Chinese people, for learning Shanghainese. I'm not sure what the situation in academic literature is though.

 

I am not familiar with Wugniu, but presumably this is based on a specific dialect of Wu? Wu is a language family, not a language. Wu encompasses pretty much all the dialects from Shanghai to Wenzhou, the two extremes of which are completely mutually unintelligible. So I doubt any single romanisation system would be suitable for all of them. The other thing is that even in Shanghai, pronunciation can vary from region to region. Tones are also variable. As you alluded to, in Shanghainese, tones apply on a word by word basis (as in Japanese) rather than character by character. The thing is, words like 'Shanghainese' in Shanghainese (which consists of four syllables) can vary depending on whether the speaker considers this to be one word, or 'Shanghai' and 'language' to be two separate words.

 

On the other hand, I think a dictionary would not be very useful if no tone notation is given at all. What is the point of looking up a word if you still can't read it even after you've found it?

 

Incidentally, one of the best dictionaries I have seen for Shanghainese is the 上海话大词典 published by 上海辞书出版社. I have attached a photo of a sample page below. I'm not sure which romanisation system this is, and it takes some time getting used to, but at least it shows pronunciation including tones. If my memory serves me correctly, the same publisher released a later version of the dictionary and unfathomably dispensed with the tone information. What was a good dictionary became pretty useless in my opinion.