Eclectus Han character dictionary

So a release is only out once the developer blogs about it, they say. This afternoon I tagged and packaged what is now 0.2beta of Eclectus. I also created a page on the KDE application site as I believe it is now ready for wider consumption. Packages ... [More] for Linux distributions should now make it easy for ppl to install it. While I have many ideas for Eclectus, even some I haven't seen in any electronic dictionary so far, I am currently left with only few time. I'd also like to cater to Windows and Mac users in the future, but porting Eclectus to a Qt-only version will surely need a week of work, something I currently cannot affort. Goals in the near future will be stabilizing the application and creating a nice dictionary abstraction layer to offer better integration for the different dictionaries around. I'm so far maybe my happiest user. Eclectus helps me in my daily learning routine, and I never look back to the tools I used (or tried to use) before. I hope others have similar experiences. [Less]

I just registered at Ohloh, and updated information for cjklib and Eclectus. I kind of like the social networking approach, but am not sure how much this site is recognized. I might start using the "journal" feature, maybe together with twitter, to ... [More] inform about recent changes to the two projects. I do think that my information policy could be improved, but I am ever so busy working on my projects, that I don't blog about it. If you like the two projects, I welcome you to join the "I use it" feature. Gives your friendly developer some feedback :) for Eclectus for cjklib [Less]

Sorting and indexing English words or those of other languages with roman alphabet is pretty easy, as letters are ordered from A to Z. Chinese characters are much more difficult to handle, as setting up a distinct order for each and every character ... [More] fails due to the sheer number of characters - there's even no distinguishable upper limit. <!--break--> Radical 53 in other characters Radicals can solve the ordering issue. To understand how they work you have to know that Chinese characters (sino-japanese characters, ...) are made of components with its minimal set being around 1000 if I recall correctly (DeFrancis has something on that). Radicals are a special group of those components as they try to (almost) span the whole set (of unknown size) of characters and to some extend are regarded to reflect a semantic aspect of each character. The construct is man-made and thus doesn't reflect an underlying rule of the writing system, so several radical sets exist. The best known set is the group of 214 Kangxi radicals which where used in the Kangxi Dictionary and are still used today, even though there are sets that have been developed later on. But I want to talk about how those radical forms are called, so allow me to go in medias res. Some of those radicals are characters themselves, some are only found as components or even as single strokes. While the former can be easily named by there character (e.g. horse) it has proven that distinct names for radical forms are helpful and so for example Herbert A. Giles lists some in his radical table of "A Chinese-English Dictionary" (1912). To give an example 疒 is not used alone as a character but in a character like 病 (bìng, "ill") and is called 病字旁 (bìngzìpáng) literally meaning "character-病 side" as it occurs on the left side of the character for "ill". I'm looking for a list of those names. One use case will be Eclectus that has a radical table letting you search in several ways, one being the Chinese name of the radical. In the following I'll list the names I found, myself being critical though to what extend it will be possible to setup a fully covering list of those colloquial names. From "A Chinese-English Dictionary" This list is from Giles' "A Chinese-English Dictionary" in the second edition from 1912. It is unsure if all those names are still in use today, or if some of them were subject to change in the last nearly 100 years. 1 一橫 yīhéng 2 一竪 yīshù 3 一點 yīdiǎn 4 一撇 yīpiě 7 兩橫 liǎnghéng 9 (Variant) 單立人 dānlìrén 13 三道框 sāndàokuàng 14 禿寶蓋 tūbǎogài 15 兩點水 liǎngdiǎnshuǐ 18 (Variant) 立刀 lìdāo 22 三道框 sāndàokuàng 23 三道框 sāndàokuàng 26 硬耳刀 yìngěrdāo 27 禿偏上 tūpiānshàng 31 四道框 sìdàokuàng 32 土堆 tǔduī 32 (Variant) 提土 títǔ 40 寳蓋 bǎogài 45 半草 bàncǎo 47 (Variant) 三臥人 sānwòrén 47 (Variant) 兩臥人 liǎngwòrén 50 大巾旁 dàjīnpáng 53 偏上 piānshàng 58 橫山 héngshān 59 三撇 sānpiě 60 雙立人 shuānglìrén 61 (Variant) 竪心 shùxīn 64 (Variant) 提手 tíshǒu 66 反文 fǎnwén 66 (Variant) 反文 fǎnwén 85 (Variant) 三點水 sāndiǎnshuǐ 86 (Variant) 四點火 sìdiǎnhuǒ 93 提牛旁 tíniúpáng 94 (Variant) 反犬 fǎnquǎn 94 (Variant) 犬猶 quǎnyóu 96 (Variant) 斜玉 xiéyù 104 病字旁 bìngzìpáng 108 皿堆 mǐnduī 115 禾木 hémù 116 穴字頭 xuèzìtóu 118 竹字頭 zhúzìtóu 120 絞絲 jiǎosī 122 (Variant) 扁四 biǎnsì 130 (Variant) 肉字旁 ròuzìpáng 140 (Variant) 草字頭 cǎozìtóu 143 血堆 xiěduī 146 四字部 sìzìbù 154 具貝邊 jùbèibiān 157 足路 zúlù 162 (Variant) 走之 zǒuzhī 163 (Variant) 輭耳刀 ruǎněrdāo 163 (Variant) 右耳刀 yòuěrdāo 170 (Variant) 左耳刀 zuǒěrdāo 173 兩字頭 liǎngzìtóu Others from German Wikipedia This is a list of other names from the radical articles of the German Wikipedia. Some are just slight abbreviations compared to the upper table, still being included here though. 8 頭 tóu 9 (Variant) 單人旁 dānrénpáng 12 (Variant) 倒八字 dàobāzì 12 (Variant) 羊角 yángjiǎo 13 上三框 shàngsānkuàng 14 平寶蓋 píngbǎogài 15 冰 bīng 17 下三框 xiàsānkuàng 18 (Variant) 立刀旁 lìdāopáng 20 包字頭 bāozìtóu 22 左三框 zuǒsānkuàng 22 區字框 qūzìkuàng 26 單耳旁 dāněrpáng 31 圍 wéi 31 圍字框 wéizìkuāng 31 口字框 kǒuzìkuāng 31 大口框 dàkǒukuāng 60 雙人旁 shuāngrénpáng 64 (Variant) 提手旁 tíshǒupáng 75 木字旁 mùzìpáng 81 比較 bǐjiào 82 毛筆 máobǐ 86 (Variant) 四點 sìdiǎn 87 (Variant) 爪部 zhuǎbù 93 (Variant) 牛字旁 niúzìpáng 94 (Variant) 反犬旁 fǎnquǎnpáng 94 (Variant) 犬部 quǎnbù 96 (Variant) 王字旁 wángzǐpáng 115 禾木旁 hémùpáng 120 (Variant) 絞絲旁 jiǎosīpáng 122 (Variant) 四字頭 sìzìtóu 129 毛筆 máobǐ 141 虎 hǔ 149 (Variant) 言字旁 yánzìpáng 157 (Variant) 足字旁 zúzìpáng 162 (Variant) 走字旁 zǒuzìpáng 162 (Variant) 建字旁 jiànzìpáng 163 (Variant) 右耳朵 yòuěrduo 167 (Variant) 金字旁 jīnzìpáng 170 (Variant) 耳刀 ěrdāo 184 (Variant) 食字旁 shízìpáng I'll continue to collect colloquial names under Eclectus' svn, so check there for updates. [Less]

[img_assist|nid=199|title=Eclectus screenshot showing handwriting box|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=55|height=100]This morning I told Eclectus how to use Tegaki, the successor of Tomoe in handwriting recognition of Chinese characters (including ... [More] Kanji). Motivated by Tegaki moving into Debian in the past few days, and Tomoe being only available in openSUSE but not in Debian or Ubuntu, I changed Eclectus' handwriting widget to support either of them, prefering now Tegaki. The diff is relatively small (1), hopefully we can totally drop Tomoe in the future making the code cleaner. For Eclectus these changes will bring better recognition results and hopefully more features of the actively developed project. You can read more about Tegaki on the developer's blog under http://www.mblondel.org/journal/category/handwriting-recognition/. My original widget will be maintained in the Eclectus project under (2). We'll see what more will change. Now, still missing is support for traditional Chinese, anyone? [Less]

[img_assist|nid=194|title=Full Dictionary View|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=73|height=100] May 27th, 2009 I would like to announce Eclectus, a Han character dictionary especially suited for learners [1] (see screencast [2]). Motivation The lack ... [More] of a good and user-friendly learner's dictionary for Chinese motivated the work in the past months that went into Eclectus. With more than 40,000 mostly complexly shaped Chinese characters the Chinese script is rather difficult to learn. This dictionary tries to acknowledge that and offers a wide set of features including quick ways to find characters you don't know how to input. <!--break--> Implementation Eclectus heavily builds on cjklib, a Python-based library for handling Chinese characters I only announced last week [3]. While the library matures, Eclectus will at the same time grow in functions and data. While currently mostly only Chinese features are being implemented, the goal is to provide the same level of features for Japanese and for other languages relying on Chinese characters. The dictionary currently relies on KDE-bindings, which for now limits its use to Linux. One future goal is to provide the same functionalities under a pure Qt foundation, and then making Eclectus available on Windows and Mac OS X. Try it out You are welcome to give Eclectus a try and join as a user or even a developer to make this dictionary the best out there. Checkout svn or use the snapshot packages available for download. Please note the list of current shortcomings [4], which you may take as a starting point to get involved yourself :) Now the mandatory warning for early adaptors: Eclectus is still in an early development stage, expect errors and sparse data. Tell me what you think [1] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/ [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwDeUSkQugU [3] http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uyhc/en/content/announcing-cjklib [4] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/issues/list [img_assist|nid=193|title=Handwriting Recognition for Japanese|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=71][img_assist|nid=195|title=Radical Table|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=71][img_assist|nid=196|title=Multi-radical search|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=71] [Less]