Hakka dialect data on ZDIC, and it's origins

The character pronunciations in Hakka come from 9 different sources, but to compound the problem, the tone system is not straight forward. Here, we take a selection of characters (一二三四五六七八九零十百千萬億加減乘除) and list their entries in ZDIC and sort them out according to their tone numbering. We shall find 3 basic systems in use. In the second half of this essay, we delve into the origins of these character listing, and show you precisely who we should credit for making them available in the first place.

Character	客英字典	梅县腔	东莞腔	宝安腔	沙头角腔	客语拼音字汇	台湾四县腔	海陆丰腔	陆丰腔	Tone
加 ga1	ga1	ga1	ga1	ga1	ga1	ga1	ga1	ga1	ga1	Yin Ping
三 sam1	sam1 sam5	sam1 sam5	sam1	sam1 sam3	sam1	sam1	sam1 sam3	sam1 sam3	sam1
千 cien1	cien1	cien1	cen1	cen1	cien1	qian1	cien1	cien1	tsian1
乘 sin2	shin2 shin5	shin1 shin5	sin2	sin1 sin2 sin3 sin5	sin5	sin2 sin4 sin4	sen1 sen2 sen5	shin1 shin2 shin5	shin5	Yang Ping
除 cu2	chu2	chu2	ciu2	cu2	cu2	cu2	cu2	chu2	chu3
零 lang2	lang2 len2 len1	lan3 lang2 lin2	lin2	lang2	lang2	lang2	lang2 len2	lang2 len2	lang3
減 gam3	gam3	gam3	gam3	gam3	gam3	gam3	gam3	gam3		Shang Sheng
五 ng3	ng3	ng3	ng3	ng3	ng3	ng3	ng3	ng3	ng3
九 giu3	giu3	giu3	giu3	giu3	kieu3	giu3	giu3	giu3	giu3
四 si4	si5	si5	si5	si5	si5	xi4	si5	si5	si5	Qu Sheng	Yin Qu
億 yi4, yit6	ji5 jit7	ji5	jit8	jit8 ji5		yi4	ji5 jit8	ri5 rit8	jit8
二 ngi4	ngi5	ngi5 ng5	ngi5	ngi5	gni5	ngi4	ngi5	ngi6	gni6		Yang Qu
萬 van4	van5	wan5	man3	man3 wan3	man5 wan5	man4 van4	wan5	wan6	wan6
一 yit5	jit7	jit7	jit7	jit7	jit7	yid5	jit7	rit7	jit7	Yin Ru
六 liuk5	liuk7	liuk7	luk7	luk7	luk7	liug5 lug5	liuk7	liuk7	liuk7
七 cit5	cit7	cit7		cit7	cit7	qid5	cit7	cit7	cit7
八 bat5	bat7	bat7	bat7	bat7	bat7	bad5	bat7	bat7	bat7
百 bak5	bak7	bak7	bak7	bak7	bak7	bag5	bak7	bak7	bak7
十 sip6	ship8	ship8	sip8	sip8	sip8	sib6	siip8	ship8	ship8	Yang Ru
億 yi4, yit6	ji5 jit7	ji5	jit8	jit8 ji5		yi4	ji5 jit8	ri5 rit8	jit8

This can be summarised as follows:

(1) 客英字典 (2) 东莞腔 (5) 梅县腔 (6) 台湾四县腔 (8) 宝安腔 (9) 沙头角腔	1. 陰平	2. 陽平	3. 上聲	5. 去聲		7. 陰入	8. 陽入
(7) 客语拼音字汇	1. 陰平	2. 陽平	3. 上聲	4. 去聲		5. 陰入	6. 陽入
(3) 海陆丰腔 (4) 陆丰腔	1. 陰平	2. 陽平	3. 上聲	5. 陰去	6. 陽去	7. 陰入	8. 陽入

About

ZDIC is arguably one of the more popular online Chinese character resources on the internet. At one time it's sister site, longwiki.net (which stopped functioning around 2010) had user input which eventually found its way onto ZDIC. The popularity of ZDIC is down to the convenience of the collected information there. Chinese character data also includes dialect data from Cantonese, Hakka and Chaozhou and Mandarin as well as historical reconstructions of pronunciations from the Middle and Old Chinese, Early Mandarin stages of Chinese, and Sino-Xenic data like the Rimes in Mongol Script and other Chinese character rime dictioanries.The reconstructions of Middle Chinese from many past and current scholars makes ZDIC a conveninet first port of call for many who do not have physical access the data to hand. 高本漢 Bernhard Karlgren, 王力 Li Wang, 李榮 Rong Li, 邵榮芬 Rongfen Shao, 鄭張尚芳 Shangfang ZhengZhang, 潘悟雲 Wuyun Pan, 蒲立本 Edwin G. Pulleyblank, as well as amateur contributions such as 古韻羅馬字 from the Polyhedron distribution, and 有女羅馬字 from a different perspective.

As the Polyhedron distribution was open source, many of the other dialect data must also have come from similar sources. We note that there are other site which offer the same data, for example, Ctext and indeed, the Hakka dialect data that is used in ZDIC comes directly from Thomas Chin's dictionary website at Chinese Language. Chin's online dictionary has been online since 1994, and he made available his entire database for users to download, from which it is easy to verify that the data in ZDIC is a direct copy, only disguised by the fact that the data fields are changed into Chinese.

Specimen Data from Thomas Chin's CCDICT database builds

Specimen data from Thomas Chin's CCDICT 4.3.0 (2003)

一	0	1	0	1	[Sathewkok] jit7 [Lau Chunfat] yid5 [Hailu] rit7 [Bao'an] jit7 [MacIver] jit7 [Siyan] jit7 [Meixian] jit7 [Dongguan] jit7 [Lufeng] jit7	jat1	yi1 yi4 yi2		il	[1] one; unit [2] once [3] as soon as; once [4] one principle [5] single; alone [6] a; an; the [7] each; per; every time [8] another [9] whole; all; throughout; complete [10] union; uniformity; uniform [v] unify; unite [11] so; such; to such extent [12] same; together [13] a little

U+4E00.0	fCNS11643	1-4421
U+4E00.0	fBig5	A440
U+4E00.0	fGB	0-523B
U+4E00.0	fR/S	1.0
U+4E00.0	fTotalStrokes	1
U+4E00.0	fCangjie	M
U+4E00.0	fHakka	jit7 [1,2,4,5,6,8,9] yid5 [7] rit7 [3]
U+4E00.0	fCantonese	jat1
U+4E00.0	fMandarin	yi2 yi4 yi1
U+4E00.0	fEnglish	[1] one; unit [2] once [3] as soon as; once [4] one principle [5] single; alone [6] a; an; the [7] each; per; every time [8] another [9] whole; all; throughout; complete [10] union; uniformity; uniform [v] unify; unite [11] so; such; to such extent [12] same; together [13] a little

U+4E00.0	fUTF8	一
U+4E00.0	fCNS11643	1-4421
U+4E00.0	fBig5	A440
U+4E00.0	fGB	0-523B
U+4E00.0	fR/S	 1.0
U+4E00.0	fTotalStrokes	 1
U+4E00.0	fCangjie	M
U+4E00.0	fFourCorner	10000
U+4E00.0	fHakka	  jit7; rit7
U+4E00.0	fCantonese	jat1
U+4E00.0	fMandarin	yi1
U+4E00.0	fEnglish	[1] one; unit [2] whole; all; throughout; complete [3] one principle [4] once; as soon as [5] single; alone [6] slightly; a little [7] a; an; the [8] each; per; every time [9] unify; unite [10] same; together [11] union; uniformity; uniform [12] so; such; to such extent [13] another [14] once [15] a little [16] a Chinese family name

From the above successive builds, we see Thomas Chin modified his listing to remove the sources in later builds, but in the earliest specimen above CCDICT 4.3.0 we see a direct correspondence to the data that ZDIC used for its own implementation. It is probably this, or a similar build of the database from whence the ZDIC data is obtained.

Let's compare the entry of the Chinese character 一 from our specimen data and that currently available in ZDIC