I'd like to know if there is a way to sort a column of words written in hiragana, according to the Gojūon ordering, preferably using emacs.
Is there an easy way to do this, like assigning custom numerical values to the characters, and sorting accordingly?
If it is limited to Hiragana only, sort-columns should work, as Hiragana are already in Gojūon order within Unicode.
Related
In a part of my software I need, in different languages, lists of words having a fixed number of letters.
My software is already internationalized (using gettext, and it works fine). But, as it's not possible to translate a 4 letters word from english into a 4 letters word in another language (apart from some exceptions maybe), I can't imagine a reasonable way of letting gettext deal with these words lists.
So, for now, I decided to store my words like this (shortened example with english and french names):
FOUR_LETTERS_WORDS = { 'fr': ["ANGE", "ANIS", "ASIE", "AUBE", "AVEN", "AZUR"],
'en': ["LEFT", "LAMP", "ATOM", "GIRL", "PLUM", "NAVY", "GIFT", "DARK"] }
(This is python syntax, but the problem has not much to do with the programming language used)
The lists do not need to have the same length; they do not need to contain the same words.
My problem is following: if my software is to be translated in another language, like say, german, then all the strings that fall within the scope of gettext will be listed in the pot file and will be available for translation. But then, I also need a list of 4 letters words in german, that won't show up in the translation file.
I would like to know whether I need to think to ask the translator if he/she can also provide a list of such words, or if there's a better way to deal with this situation? (maybe finding a satisfying workaround with gettext?).
EDIT Realized the question has actually not much to do with the programming language, so removed the python* tags
You can do it with gettext. It's possible to use "keys" instead of complete sentences for translation.
If you use sentences in your .po files and don't want to have to translate the main language (let's say english), you don't need to translate them and only provide translation files for these words. If gettext finds a translation file, it uses it, else it will display the key (the msgid). It can be a complete sentence or a key, it does not matter.
To do that, you simply need to use a specific text domain for these words and use dgettext() function. The domain allows you to separate files depending on context, or whatever criteria of your choice (functionnality, sub-package, etc.).
To count these words, it's not as easy. You can count them with grep -c, for instance. You can provide a specific key that contains the number of 4 letters words (this would be a dirty hack on which you could probably not really rely).
Maybe there's another way in Python, I don't know this language...
I've just tried to process Cyrillic text and found out that :sort command orders lines not properly. Actually, this concerns Ukrainian letter like є, і, ї etc. Lines starting with those letters go first for some reason before а. Is there a way to order lines correctly?
Using vim's native sort: no.
From VIM 7.3 ':help sort'
The details about sorting depend on the library function used. There is no
guarantee that sorting is "stable" or obeys the current locale. You will have
to try it out.
That said, you can use the GNU coreutils sort to accomplish this for you. It's locale-aware and supports many different locale configurations. Assuming you have your locale settings configured properly, you should be able to sort the text using :{range}!sort.
I'm currently building a hash key string (collapsed from a map) where the values that are delimited by the special ASCII unit delimiter 31 (1F).
This nicely solves the problem of trying to guess what ASCII characters won't be used in the string values and I don't need to worry about escaping or quoting values etc.
However reading about the history of this is it appears to be a relic from the 1960s and I haven't seen many examples where strings are built and tokenised using this special character so it all seems too easy.
Are there any issues to using this delimiter in a modern application?
I'm currently doing this in a non-Unicode C++ application, however I'm interested to know how this applies generally in other languages such as Java, C# and with Unicode.
The lower 128 char map of ASCII is fully set in stone into the Unicode standard, this including characters 0->31. The only reason you don't see special ASCII chars in use in strings very often is simply because of human interfacing limitations: they do not visualize well (if at all) when displayed to screen or written to file, and you can't easily type them in from a keyboard either. They're also not allowed in un-escaped form within various popular 'human readable' file formats, such as XML.
For logical processing tasks within a program that do not need end-user interaction, however, they are perfectly suitable for whatever use you can find for them. Your particular use sounds novel and efficient and I think you should definitely run with it.
Your application is free to accept whatever binary format it pleases. However, if you need to embed arbitrary binary data in your input, you need to escape whatever delimiters or other special codes your format uses. This is true regardless of which ones you choose.
I'd also not ignore Unicode. It's 2012, by now it's rather silly to work with an outdated model for dealing with text. If your input data is textual, handle it as such.
The one issue that comes to mind is why invent another format instead of using XML or JSON; or if you need a compact encoding, a "binary" variant of those two (Fast Infoset, msgpack, who knows what else), or ASN.1? There's probably a whole bunch of other issues that you'll encounter when rolling your own that the design and tooling for those formats already solved.
I work with barcodes in a warehouse setting. We use ASCII code 31 as a field-separator so that a single scan can populate multiple data fields with a single scan. So, consider the ramifications if you think your hash key could end up on a barcode.
I've recently discovered, to my astonishment (having never really thought about it before), machine-sorting Japanese proper nouns is apparently not possible.
I work on an application that must allow the user to select a hospital from a 3-menu interface. The first menu is Prefecture, the second is City Name, and the third is Hospital. Each menu should be sorted, as you might expect, so the user can find what they want in the menu.
Let me outline what I have found, as preamble to my question:
The expected sort order for Japanese words is based on their pronunciation. Kanji do not have an inherent order (there are tens of thousands of Kanji in use), but the Japanese phonetic syllabaries do have an order: あ、い、う、え、お、か、き、く、け、こ... and on for the fifty traditional distinct sounds (a few of which are obsolete in modern Japanese). This sort order is called 五十音順 (gojuu on jun , or '50-sound order').
Therefore, Kanji words should be sorted in the same order as they would be if they were written in hiragana. (You can represent any kanji word in phonetic hiragana in Japanese.)
The kicker: there is no canonical way to determine the pronunciation of a given word written in kanji. You never know. Some kanji have ten or more different pronunciations, depending on the word. Many common words are in the dictionary, and I could probably hack together a way to look them up from one of the free dictionary databases, but proper nouns (e.g. hospital names) are not in the dictionary.
So, in my application, I have a list of every prefecture, city, and hospital in Japan. In order to sort these lists, which is a requirement, I need a matching list of each of these names in phonetic form (kana).
I can't come up with anything other than paying somebody fluent in Japanese (I'm only so-so) to manually transcribe them. Before I do so though:
Is it possible that I am totally high on fire, and there actually is some way to do this sorting without creating my own mappings of kanji words to phonetic readings, that I have somehow overlooked?
Is there a publicly available mapping of prefecture/city names, from the government or something? That would reduce the manual mapping I'd need to do to only hospital names.
Does anybody have any other advice on how to approach this problem? Any programming language is fine--I'm working with Ruby on Rails but I would be delighted if I could just write a program that would take the kanji input (say 40,000 proper nouns) and then output the phonetic representations as data that I could import into my Rails app.
宜しくお願いします。
For Data, dig Google's Japanese IME (Mozc) data files here.
https://github.com/google/mozc/tree/master/src/data
There is lots of interesting data there, including IPA dictionaries.
Edit:
And you may also try Mecab, it can use IPA dictionary and can convert kanjis to katakana for most of the words
https://taku910.github.io/mecab/
and there is ruby bindings for that too.
https://taku910.github.io/mecab/bindings.html
and here is somebody tested, ruby with mecab with tagger -Oyomi
http://hirai2.blog129.fc2.com/blog-entry-4.html
just a quick followup to explain the eventual actual solution we used. Thanks to all who recommended mecab--this appears to have done the trick.
We have a mostly-Rails backend, but in our circumstance we didn't need to solve this problem on the backend. For user-entered data, e.g. creating new entities with Japanese names, we modified the UI to require the user to enter the phonetic yomigana in addition to the kanji name. Users seem accustomed to this. The problem was the large corpus of data that is built into the app--hospital, company, and place names, mainly.
So, what we did is:
We converted all the source data (a list of 4000 hospitals with name, address, etc) into .csv format (encoded as UTF-8, of course).
Then, for developer use, we wrote a ruby script that:
Uses mecab to translate the contents of that file into Japanese phonetic readings
(the precise command used was mecab -Oyomi -o seed_hospitals.converted.csv seed_hospitals.csv, which outputs a new file with the kanji replaced by the phonetic equivalent, expressed in full-width katakana).
Standardizes all yomikata into hiragana (because users tend to enter hiragana when manually entering yomikata, and hiragana and katakana sort differently). Ruby makes this easy once you find it: NKF.nkf("-h1 -w", katakana_str) # -h1 means to hiragana, -w means output utf8
Using the awesomely conveninent new Ruby 1.9.2 version of CSV, combine the input file with the mecab-translated file, so that the resulting file now has extra columns inserted, a la NAME, NAME_YOMIGANA, ADDRESS, ADDRESS_YOMIGANA, and so on.
Use the data from the resulting .csv file to seed our rails app with its built-in values.
From time to time the client updates the source data, so we will need to do this whenever that happens.
As far as I can tell, this output is good. My Japanese isn't good enough to be 100% sure, but a few of my Japanese coworkers skimmed it and said it looks all right. I put a slightly obfuscated sample of the converted addresses in this gist so that anybody who cared to read this far can see for themselves.
UPDATE: The results are in... it's pretty good, but not perfect. Still, it looks like it correctly phoneticized 95%+ of the quasi-random addresses in my list.
Many thanks to all who helped me!
Nice to hear people are working with Japanese.
I think you're spot on with your assessment of the problem difficulty. I just asked one of the Japanese guys in my lab, and the way to do it seems to be as you describe:
Take a list of Kanji
Infer (guess) the yomigana
Sort yomigana by gojuon.
The hard part is obviously step two. I have two guys in my lab: 高橋 and 高谷. Naturally, when sorting reports etc. by name they appear nowhere near each other.
EDIT
If you're fluent in Japanese, have a look here: http://mecab.sourceforge.net/
It's a pretty popular tool, so you should be able to find English documentation too (the man page for mecab has English info).
I'm not familiar with MeCab, but I think using MeCab is good idea.
Then, I'll introduce another method.
If your app is written in Microsoft VBA, you can call "GetPhonetic" function. It's easy to use.
see : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa195745(v=office.11).aspx
Sorting prefectures by its pronunciation is not common. Most Japanese are used to prefectures sorted by 「都道府県コード」.
e.g. 01:北海道, 02:青森県, …, 13:東京都, …, 27:大阪府, …, 47:沖縄県
These codes are defined in "JIS X 0401" or "ISO-3166-2 JP".
see (Wikipedia Japanese) :
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%A8%E5%9B%BD%E5%9C%B0%E6%96%B9%E5%85%AC%E5%85%B1%E5%9B%A3%E4%BD%93%E3%82%B3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89
I am working on an application that allows users to input Japanese language characters. I am trying to come up with a way to determine whether the user's input is a Japanese kana (hiragana, katakana, or kanji).
There are certain fields in the application where entering Latin text would be inappropriate and I need a way to limit certain fields to kanji-only, or katakana-only, etc.
The project uses UTF-8 encoding. I don't expect to accept JIS or Shift-JIS input.
Ideas?
It sounds like you basically need to just check whether each Unicode character is within a particular range. The Unicode code charts should be a good starting point.
If you're using .NET, my MiscUtil library has some Unicode range support - it's primitive, but it should do the job. I don't have the source to hand right now, but will update this post with an example later if it would be helpful.
Not sure of a perfect answer, but there is a Unicode range for katakana and hiragana listed on Wikipedia. (Which I would expect are also available from unicode.org as well.)
Hiragana: Unicode: 3040-309F
Katakana: Unicode: 30A0–30FF
Checking those ranges against the input should work as a validation for hiragana or katakana for Unicode in a language-agnostic manner.
For kanji, I would expect it to be a little more complicated, as I
expect that the Chinese characters used in Chinese and Japanese are both included in the same range, but then again, I may be wrong here. (I can't expect that Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese to be included in the same range...)
oh oh! I had this one once... I had a regex with the hiragana, then katakana and then the kanji. I forget the exact codes, I'll go have a look.
regex is great because you double the problems. And I did it in PHP, my choice for extra strong auto problem generation
--edit--
$pattern = '/[^\wぁ-ゔァ-ヺー\x{4E00}-\x{9FAF}_\-]+/u';
I found this here, but it's not great... I'll keep looking
--edit--
I looked through my portable hard drive.... I thought I had kept that particular snippet from the last company... sorry.