粵語審音配詞字庫

This database is constructed on the basis of two earlier databases developed by the Research Centre for the Humanities Computing (formerly the Humanities Computing Programme). Since the appearance of the Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton in 1996 and the Chinese Talking Syllabary of the Cantonese Dialect: An Electronic Repository in 1998, we have been receiving notes of gratitude from users from all over the Internet. Out of the many suggestions they made, the crucial one was the expansion of our databases from a pure syllabary structure into one which covers semantic information of the characters. In response to this suggestion of our users, in particular their concern for the semantic disambiguation of Chinese polyphonic characters, a database carrying the current title was planned. Being functionally versatile and user-friendly like its two predecessors, the current new database excels further in the following respects: This fully revised and expanded database covering the complete Big5 Chinese character set is now the most comprehensive syllabary of the Cantonese dialect on the Internet. It covers in the first place the syllabric data of four major works, namely, 1) S. L. Wong's A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton, 2) Li Chomin's Lishi Zhongwen Zidian, 3) Zhou Wuji and Rao Bingcai's Guangzhou Hua Biaozunyin Zihui and 4) Richard Ho and Chu Kwok-fan's Yuehyin Zhengdu Zihui. To make up what is still missing, linguistic information of nine other major works are consulted. To take into account the linguistic reality of the Hong Kong society, vernacular pronunciation data provided by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong are also included. Besides pronunciations, typical word-forms or vocabularies are provided for every character in this database. These word-forms are grouped with respect to the proper pronunciation(s) of the respective head characters so that users can disambiguate polyphonic characters that are phonologically ambiguous. In cases where common vocabularies are not readily available, brief remarks or explanations will be given. It supports up to seven transciption (romanization) schemes of the Cantonese dialect. Users can switch from one scheme to the other wherever necessary. When a certain head character is being featured, basic information such as pronunciation(s), homophones, vocabularies etc. are tabulated. In addition to these, further lexical information related to that particular character will also be provided for easy reference, as, for instances, internal codes (Big5 and Unicode), Cangjie input code, radical belonging , number of strokes, basic English translation, pagination of important references and hyperlinks pointing to various online resources. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Ms. Ginny Chan, former instructor of Yale-China Chinese Language Center, CUHK, for her courtesy in demonstrating 1,900 unique Cantonese pronunciations on a volunteer basis.