Subject: Machine readable data

From: Ross Paterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1992 14:37:42 GMT

I've just placed some data in a directory /incoming/hanzi-data on
crl.nmsu.edu.  Perhaps the directory could be moved to /pub/chinese.

Here is the README:

These are a number of files containing data about Hanzi.  The data is
incomplete and contains many errors -- I would appreciate suggestions,
corrections and additions, which I will incorporate into future versions.

Records end with linefeeds; fields are separated by tabs.

zidian - ASCII: [GB code, BIG-5 code, pronunciation, English meaning]
        This file was built by collating various partial relations,
        including GB/BIG-5 relations from Ed Lai's hypercard stacks,
        Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung's HC (some of which also comes from
        Ed Lai) and Urs Widmer's SINICODE, plus various input methods
        for both GB and BIG-5, some of which also derive from Ed Lai's
        hypercard stacks.  I've also checked a number of disagreements
        between the various sources and added a little data myself.

        The weakest part of the file is the English entries, which are
        taken from the file DOHERTY.SIN, from 'chinese.tar.Z' in the
        MetaFont distribution, and described as "the databank for some
        project in California".  The matching with character codes was
        mostly automated, based on pronunciation, radical and stroke
        count, so expect quite few errors.  And don't expect to understand
        Chinese words from these short character entries.

zidian.gb - ASCII/GB: [character, pinyin, English meaning]
        Automatically generated from 'zidian'.

zidian.b5 - ASCII/BIG-5: [character, pinyin, English meaning]
        Automatically generated from 'zidian'.

parts - ASCII: [character, radical, base character]
        This file gives analyses of characters into radicals and bases.
        The characters are represented by hexadecimal Unicodes; mappings
        to various CJK standards are available by anonymous FTP as

                unicode.org:/pub/MappingTables/cjkxref.fix

        Only the characters from GB0 and BIG-5 are covered so far, and
        800 of those are not yet done -- some are unanalysable, many
        I haven't got round to.  The radicals are the traditional 214,
        mostly as implied by the Unicode ordering; some are subdivided
        by adding various letters.  A base of '-' means empty; '?'
        means unknown.  A few of the bases are given as two characters,
        one for the traditional form of the whole character, and one
        for the simplified form.  At the end of the file are a few
        invented codes, starting with an 'X', for other common bases.
        Some of the analyses of GB characters used data from Ed Lai's
        GB hypercard stack.

radicals - ASCII: [radical, stroke count, extra strokes]
        This file gives stroke counts for the traditional ways of writing
        the various radicals.  Some radicals include a number of extra
        strokes that are normally included in the residue stroke count.

parts.gb - ASCII/GB: [character, radical, base character]
        Automatically generated from 'parts'.

parts.b5 - ASCII/BIG-5: [character, radical, base character, stroke count]
        Automatically generated from 'parts', with stroke counts mostly
        derived from the BIG-5 ordering.
--
Ross Paterson <[email-masked]>
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London SW7