Maryknoll have just updated their dictionary page with an Excel-format spreadsheet of the content of their Taiwanese-English dictionary. The spreadsheet consists of 55,903 entries, with four columns for each entry (sort, romanization, Mandarin in characters, and English). Here’s a quick sample:

Father Clarence Engler, leader of the dictionary team at Maryknoll, has informed me that there is no electronic file of the other dictionary they publish, the English-Amoy dictionary (the manuscript was produced in the days before personal computers). However, with this Taiwanese-English data now available, it will make a superb base for an online dictionary project (of which more in the coming days and weeks).

EDIT: Father Engler has just emailed to say that the spreadsheet has not been fully proof-read, and likely contains errors, especially in the Chinese characters. Caveat emptor!

After the recent news that Maryknoll have decided to license their dictionaries under the Creative Commons, they have now uploaded pdf versions of both the Taiwanese-English and English-Taiwanese dictionaries to their website.

The documents are divided into letters of the alphabet, but the entirety of both dictionaries is available there. The great work put in by generations of Maryknoll teachers and scholars deserves applause, and the wider availability of resources such as this can only benefit the Taiwanese language community.

As an aside, those of you familiar with POJ will notice a couple of peculiarities in the orthography used by Maryknoll. The fifth tone, represented elsewhere by a circumflex, is rendered with a breve, and the superscript “n” for a nasal vowel is replaced with an asterisk in Maryknoll texts.

Great news for English speakers learning Taiwanese: Catholic missionary language training centre Maryknoll have just decided to release the contents of their two dictionaries (the English-Amoy Dictionary and the Taiwanese-English Dictionary) under a Creative Commons license. Their content, like this site, will now be open to anyone to use and remix, as long as the original authors are credited.

I have had discussions with Fr. Clarence Engler, the leader of the dictionary project, for a few months now, making the case for Creative Commons and trying to persuade Maryknoll to make the switch. I’m delighted to see they’ve done this and that their great work can now be reused and built upon by others.

I plan to use the data from the dictionaries as the basis of a free online dictionary, something along the lines of the CEDICT project. Maryknoll are currently revising their dictionaries, so I will be concentrating on putting the structure together first, before integrating the new data once it is ready. As for a timeline, we’re probably looking at a year before this is up and running properly, but hopefully it will prove useful. If you’d like to get involved in this project please drop me a line – I’d be very pleased to hear from you.