CEDICT.DOC - README file for CEDICT - Chinese-English Dictionary
23 January 2003
Preface
~~~~~~~
Sometime in 2000 the web page of the originator of the CEDICT project,
Paul Denisowski, disappeared from the web and his e-mail addresses
stopped working. To continue the work, I have taken the last versions
of the dictionary and have started correcting and adding to them with
the same intent as Paul, to provide a freely available, searchable
Chinese/English dictionary. Below is the original README file from
Paul.
Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The objective of the CEDICT project is to create an online, downloadable
(as opposed to searchable-only) public-domain Chinese-English dictionary.
For the most part, the project is modelled on Jim Breen's highly successful
EDICT (Japanese-English dictionary) project and is intended to be a
collaborative effort, with users providing entries and corrections to
the main file. For specific limitations regarding its use, please see
the CEDICT license included in Appendix A of this document.
History
~~~~~~~
Since the project was only started in October 1997, it's probably a bit
of a stretch to say that it has a "history". Actually, the project
in part grew out of my (very limited) involvement in the EDICT project,
which gave me some very useful practice in compiling dictionary entries.
After beginning the PhD program in Linguistics at UNC-CH, I had decided
to dust off my (very dusty) Chinese to help in my academic research
of Asian languages (particularly Vietnamese). To this end I began
to keep a list of words I encountered in my reading, and this list
formed the original (c. 500 entry) CEDICT, which I first posted to my
UNC web site (http://www.unc.edu/~pauld) sometime in November 1997. Since
then the list has grown at a fairly steady pace. In April 1998, the CEDICT
project was moved to a new location (www.mindspring.com/~paul_denisowski).
In May 1998, CEDICT began to be mirrored at the Monash Nihongo ftp archive
(ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/) thanks to the very generous effort of
Jim Breen. Now it is hosted at http://www.mandarintools.com/cedict.html
Contributors
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Although CEDICT started out as a one-person project, contributions from
the Internet community have become the major source of new entries.
Contributors thus far to the project are (in chronological
order):
Ocrat, Mike Wright, Wenke Wei, Sharlene Liu, Richard Warmington,
Erik Peterson, Derek Chadwick, Dave Hiebeler, Steve Swales, Carl Hoffman
(Please let me know if I've left someone off the list)
Another important contributor is the creator of NJSTAR, Hongbo Ni
(hongbo@njstar.com.au : http://www.njstar.com.au) who provided
the tools needed to generate the NJSTAR dictionary index files.
Although I originally used a home-brew Perl script to do this,
the newer method is a _substantial_ and much appreciated improvement
over my own meager efforts.
Last, but certainly not least of the CEDICT contributors is Jim Breen,
who not only provided the inspiration for CEDICT through the highly
successful EDICT project, but who has also very graciously allowed
CEDICT to be mirrored at the Monash Nihongo ftp site
(ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/).
Contribution Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Contributions are always warmly welcome.
THE TECHNICAL GUIDELINES
The CEDICT format is:
CHINESE [pinyin] /English definition 1/English definition 2/.../
Please send entries in Big5 encoding
Pinyin tones should be indicated by numbers 1-5, as follows:
1=level tone, 2=rising tone, 3=mid-rising tone, 4=falling tone, 5=neutral tone
Please indicate the neutral tone (5) (e.g. xue2 sheng5 instead of xue2 sheng)
I've also been seperating pinyin syllables with a space for
readability, e.g. [zhong1 guo2] instead of [zhong1guo2]
Avoid using square brackets for anything but pinyin. Use parenthesis
instead: e.g. /Beijing (capital of mainland China)/ and not /Beijing
[....]/
Avoid using hyphens (-) in the pinyin
I'm also trying to keep all the pinyin lowercase, even for proper nouns.
Please mail all contributions to cedict@chinesetools.com
THE NON-TECHNICAL GUIDELINES
In order to preserve the public-domain/freeware aspect of this
dictionary, please do not send in entries from copyrighted sources,
especially from electronic media. This also includes web sites with
copyrighted material. If in doubt, please ask the copyright owner
first.
Please make sure to check your contributions against the latest
version of CEDICT. Editing for duplicates has become a more serious
issue as the dictionary grows in size. If you want to submit
additional definitions for existing entries, please submit ONLY the
new definition in the normal CEDICT format (I have a script that will
merge them).
Please try to observe the CEDICT format. Again, I don't mind writing
scripts to clean up contributions that don't meet the above format,
but it's impractical to do this except for very large files
Please be careful about pinyin tones, especially when it comes to
hanzi that change tone (such as "bu" - not, or "yi" - one) and final
hanzi (as in "xue2 sheng5"). Since I'm not a native speaker I have to
rely on the goodwill of others to correct pinyin/hanzi errors.
Although I've gotten some suggestions about splitting CEDICT up into
specialized dictionaries (esp for proper names and technical terms, as
EDICT has done), for the time being, there's no need to seperate
entries by subject matter.
Revision History (since 16 December 1997)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Version:
16 December 1997
1337 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
17 December 1997
1677 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski, Ocrat
28 December 1997
2077 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
2 January 1998
2115 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
NJSTAR dictionary format version now supplied using tools
provided by NJSTAR's creator, Hongbo Ni
9 January 1998
2751 entries
Corrections by Mike Wright
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
20 January 1998
3252 entries
Corrections by Ocrat
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
01 February 1998
3947 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
14 March 1998
4570 entries
Corrections by Wenke Wei and Sharlene Liu
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
29 March 1998
7419 entries
VOA vocabulary files contributed by Ocrat (c. 4500 entries)
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
06 April 1998
Project moves to new website: www.mindspring.com/~paul_denisowski/cedict.html
7720 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Richard Warmington, Paul Denisowski
11 April 1998
7850 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
24 April 1998
8447 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Erik Peterson, Paul Denisowski
4 May 1998
11349 entries
Over 3000 entries contributed by Derek Chadwick
Contributions/Corrections by Paul Denisowski
11 May 1998
11564 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Richard Warmington, Paul Denisowski
Jim Breen adds CEDICT to Monash Nihongo ftp archive:
ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/
01 June 1998
12132 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Ocrat, Paul Denisowski
05 July 1998
12221 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Dave Hiebeler, Steve Swales, Carl Hoffman, Paul Denisowski
1 Septemeber 1998
16830 entries
Contributions/Corrections by Dave Hiebeler, Erik Peterson, Paul Denisowski
1 November 1998
23510 entries
Merged in public-domain cchelp file (Author: Stephen G. Simpson simpson@math.psu.edu)
2 September 2000
23484 entries
Fixed formatting errors, regularized the way u: is represented,
added a 5 to indicate light tone on pinyin with no tone number,
reordered dictionary by pinyin, and removed some duplicate entries.
5 January 2001
23481 entries
Made corrections and removed duplicate entries suggested by Richard
Warmington.
26 June 2002
23483 entries
Ran the dictionary through a spell checker and fixes dozens of
English definition spelling errors.
9 January 2003
B5: Unique Words: 22947, Definitions: 23519
Added in contributions from Sebastien Bruggeman and others. Fixed
spelling and pinyin errors. Removed duplicate entries.
23 January 2003
GB Words: 21544, Defs: 22346
Big5 Words: 23820, Defs: 24400
Added in some wordlists. Fixed some errors in creation of GB
version.
28 January 2003
GB Words: 23243, Defs: 24063
Big5 Words: 25541, Defs: 26120
Added in a huge wordlist from Ron Grenier (Thanks Ron!)
07 February 2003
GB Words: 23316, Defs: 24149
Big5 Words: 25616, Defs: 26206
Added in Chinese titles for various family relations.
27 February 2003
GB Words: 23451, Defs: 24285
Big5 Words: 25746, Defs: 26343
Added in fixes and new words from Eric Goodell (Thanks Eric!)
28 April 2003
GB Words: 23494, Defs: 24328
Big5 Words: 25789, Defs: 26387
Various corrections and new words from the news.
30 May 2003
GB Words: 23512, Defs: 24345
Big5 Words: 25807, Defs: 26404
Various corrections and new words from the news.
==========================================================================
CEDICT LICENCE STATEMENT
Copyright (C) 1997, 1998 Paul Andrew Denisowski
This licence statement and copyright notice applies to the CEDICT
Chinese/English Dictionary file, the associated documentation file
CEDICT.DOC, and any data files which are derived from them.
COPYING AND DISTRIBUTION
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of these files
provided this copyright notice and permission notice is distributed with all
copies. Any distribution of the files must take place without a financial
return, except a charge to cover the cost of the distribution medium.
Permission is granted to make and distribute extracts or subsets of the CEDICT
file under the same conditions applying to verbatim copies.
Permission is granted to translate the English elements of the CEDICT file
into other languages, and to make and distribute copies of those translations
under the same conditions applying to verbatim copies.
USAGE
These files may be freely used by individuals, and may be accessed by
software belonging to, or operated by, such individuals.
The files, extracts from the files, and translations of the files must not be
sold as part of any commercial software package, nor must they be
incorporated in any published dictionary or other printed document without
the specific permission of the copyright holder.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright over the documents covered by this statement is held by
Paul Denisowski.