Not understaindg the meanings of some alphabets in the dictionary

[yangwenbo99]

I decided to improve this project several days ago and want to enhance the dictionary.

However, after some investigation, I found that there are some special characters in the dictionary files. For example, the capitalised I, r, capitalised A and capitalised O. It seems that these files are about different variances of Hokkienese, but I cannot figure out the exact usage of these characters. (Like 拍麻雀 phah ba chIak)

As I only use Amoy Hokkienese, I don't understand the exact meaning of this usage in different Hokkienese variance. Can you provide some reference for these usages? Moreover, it would be better if the reference for editing the dictionary file can be provided.

[a-thok]

You've got it right, those weird symbols are designed to be compatible with different variants.

雀,, as an example, is pronounced as tshiok in Xiamen and Quanzhou, but tshiak in Zhangzhou. The same thing happens with other characters such as 脚 and 约, which are pronounced kiok and iok in Quanzhou, but kiak and iak in Zhangzhou.

However, not every iok in Quanzhou automatically becomes iak in Zhangzhou. For example, in both Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, 竹 is read as tiok, and 煏 is piak.

So, for those characters that have different readings in different variants, we can't just mark them as 'iak' and map them to iok for Quanzhou and Xiamen, because that will also make 煏 to become piok, and that's obviously wrong. For the same reason, we also can't mark them all as 'iok' and map them to iak for Zhangzhou.

There may be better ways to do this, but at that time, in order to make this table compatible with mainstream Hokkien dialects, I just capitalized those readings that are ponounced differently. So if you see iok or iak in this table, that means those readings are indeed iok and iak respectively in every dialects (at least the ones I know). But if you see Iak, it means the actual reading is iok in Quanzhou/Xiamen and iak in Zhangzhou.

It would be very helpful if you intend to improve this project. Though, to make it usable for users of different dialects, you may need to be familiar with those divarications we discussed above, and keep the compatibility.

[a-thok]

symbol	example	Quanzhou	Xiamen	Zhangzhou	character amount
uAinn	縣	uinn	uainn	uan	very small
aInn	先	uinn	ing	an	small
uInn/uI	黄/卵	ng	ng	uinn/ui	considerable
Iang/Iak	香/約	iong/iok	iong/iok	iang/iak	large
IR1	去	ir	i	i	very small
Er/Erh	袋/雪	erh	eh	eh	small
oO 2	高	oo	/	/	small
iO	后	io	oo	oo	large, though most are rarely used
U 2	區	u	u	i	small

1. Normally, ir in Quanzhou becomes u in Xiamen, but a very small number of common characters have the irregular reading i, these readings are marked as IR.
2. Some literary (文读) o can also (or only) be pronounced as oo in Quanzhou. this one is specifically designed for Quanzhou, and is ignored for Xiamen or Zhangzhou.
3. A small number of literary u becomes i in Zhangzhou ( I'm not very sure about this one, the amount may not be small ).

Besides the ones listed above, there is also Io which is designed to cater dialects of Taiwan. 'Io' for Taiwan is similar to 'IR' for Xiamen: normally 'iO' becomes oo in Taiwan, but a small number of them have the irregular reading 'io'.