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Now Blogging Afresh at Ad Orientem 西儒 - The Western Confucian



Friday, May 20, 2005

Sinogram Software
Here is a description from The Marmot's Hole of a new program offered by Sungnyemun.org:
    This is a substitute for the System’s Character Palette - at least for people focusing on the so-called CJKV languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese). So pieces of software are cross-platform. Tomabaem, like Unicode, is cross-language. Whatever you are looking for related to Chinese characters, there’s a high chance that Tomabaem has a way of looking it up. Be it the Cantonese pronunciation, the UTF-16 codepoint, the radical (搎瑳), the meaning, or the character itself, which you can copy/paste or drag’n'drop from another document - a browser window, a word-processor - if the data is available in the Unicode Standard, version 4, you should be able to dig it out. We use the UniHan.txt file from the Unicode Consortium, partially re-indexed for speed, as the basis of the data shown.
This looks quite amazing. I'm glad Vietnamese was included. When learning Korean, I was surprised by how many words were cognates with Vietnamese (a langauge I could once communicate in but now have almost completely forgotten). Of course, these cognates are based on the same Chinese characters. Sino-Korean pronunciations are often closer to Cantonese (or even Vietnamese) that they are to Mandarin.