Acknowledgments

From Wenlin Guide

Wenlin User’s Guide

Acknowledgments for the Wenlin Software

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Wenlin project since I started it in 1988, including all the teachers, students, scholars and friends who have been extremely helpful with advice and evaluations. Their names are too numerous to list, but I will attempt to acknowledge some of the most helpful contributors.

• Prof. Samuel Hung-nin Cheung deserves special mention for supporting the project at a very early stage. Also, Prof. Cheung, along with June Peijun Chen, recorded the pronunciations of all the Mandarin syllables. Peter Tennenbaum designed and co-authored the original print version of this User’s Guide, engineered the sound recording, and did testing and planning in the first several years. Paul Baber helped port Wenlin to MS-Windows, and did early testing, planning, editing, and publicity. The Unicode Consortium created and maintains The Unicode Standard. Jim Caldwell first told me about Unicode; his company, Pacific Rim Connections, also provided valuable technical assistance at the First International Conference on New Technologies in Teaching and Learning Chinese, in 1995, where Wenlin made its debut. Thanks to the organizers of that conference, and to Lu Jin for helping on that occasion and others. Diane Caudillo helped edit the Wenlin version 3 User’s Guide. Javier Roca made the printed User’s Guide cover art. Elisabeth Nuboer-Ranjhan, Mark Roblee and Jacqueline Strauss have made Wenlin available worldwide.

• John DeFrancis and his team (see below) compiled the ABC Dictionary. Its first edition was combined with Wenlin 2.0; the second, Chinese-English Comprehensive edition was combined with Wenlin 3.0; and the third edition, titled ABC English-Chinese/Chinese-English Dictionary, was combined with Wenlin 4.0. The inspirational Dr. DeFrancis and his co-workers (including Robert Hsu, designer of the “band notation”) were very generous with information and advice on integrating Wenlin and ABC. Jonathan Roberts at the University of Hawai‘i has provided essential help with licensing and legal issues.

• Richard Cook provided frequency statistics described in Appendix A, is co-author of the Character Description Language (CDL) specification, assisted in the addition of component data and created CDL descriptions for tens of thousands of characters, did extensive programming, testing, planning, and documentation (including conversion of this Guide to its new online Wiki format). Wenlin’s Shuowen text and Seal Font are Copyright © 2015 Richard S. Cook.

• Silas Brown, Richard Cook, Vince Chang, Jacob Marble, Torben Prokscha, and Edison Yee, all contributed to C programming development. Dave Hobbs did website work. Straker Translations translated wenlin.com into Chinese, and Matthew Trueman produced the corresponding Pinyin version.

• Prof. Kerson Huang very kindly gave permission to include his excellent translation of the I Ching. Kim Shrier and Carol Deihl wrote the awesome B+Tree indexing library (published by Mix Software), which makes Wenlin’s dictionary as fast and flexible as it is. A variety of free internet data sources have been useful, including: the Unihan Database maintained by John Jenkins, Richard Cook, and Ken Lunde; bitmap fonts and pinyin data organized by Ross Paterson, Guo Jin, Christian Wittern, and others. Some essential software libraries used by Wenlin are FreeType (for fonts; thanks especially to Werner Lemberg, David Turner, and Suzuki Toshiya), PCRE (for regular expressions, thanks to Philip Hazel), ICU (International Components for Unicode, thanks to the Unicode Consortium), and the Independent JPEG Group. Thanks to the developers of MediaWiki used for the website version of this Guide, and to Connelly Barnes for the mw2html script we adapted for making the local HTML version.

• The following people have helped in various ways, including field testing and advising: Armando Baltra, Glenn Becker, Gloria Bien, David Branner, David Carpenter, Ralph Carter, David Chang, Kai Chu, Cynthia Col, Francois Demay, Brian Duckworth, Klaus Flessel, Michael Harack, Michael Heinz, Ash Henson, Greg Howell, David Kleist, Erik Klepsvik, Jane Leung Larson, Adam Lau, Patrick Lin, David Lord, Victor Mair, Kurt Matthaus, E. V. Moy, Larry Murray, Daniel Nickle, Cynthia Ning, Steven Poling, Brent Ramerth, Eric Rasmussen, Christophe Renaud, Stephan Hyeonjun Stiller, Mark Swofford, Daniel Tschudi, Stephen Tschudi, Martin Woesler, Zhang Yanyin, and Zhang Zhengsheng.

Most of the people mentioned above helped in more ways, and many more people whom I’ve left out are equally deserving of recognition. All remaining flaws are my own responsibilities.

—Tom Bishop, Wenlin Institute, Inc.

Acknowledgments for the ABC English-Chinese/Chinese-English Dictionary

This dictionary has been made possible by the volunteer contributions of numerous individuals, by grants from the US Department of Education and the University of Hawai‘i Office of Technology Transfer and Economic Development, and by the generosity of the University of Hawai‘i Center for Chinese Studies through its successive directors Professors Roger T. Ames and Ronald Brown; its associate director Professor Cynthia Y. Ning, who was particularly helpful in arranging for all manner of logistical support; and its coordinator Daniel Tschudi, who helped out in myriad aspects of the project.

Professor Victor H. Mair, editor of our whole ABC series, made major scholarly contributions that included participation in decision-making, checking the entire material, especially in the final stages, and leading a team involved in the massive task of proofreading (see below).

Tom Bishop, creator of Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese, assisted in every step of the project by providing linguistic expertise and technical implementation for the innumerable tasks involved in producing the dictionary, including addition of complex (traditional) forms of Chinese characters, addition of International Phonetic Alphabet for English pronunciations, creation of new entries, checking and revision of existing entries (for consistency, orthography, parts of speech, grammar, etc.), abridgment, indexing, and the final production of camera-ready copy.

Zhang Liqing, a retired professor from Swarthmore College, made the initial selection of terms for the Chinese-English section, a task that was particularly onerous because it had to be done twice, the initial draft having been lost somewhere in the transition from Pennsylvania to Hawai‘i. Dr. Zhang Yanhua, a professor at Clemson University, was very helpful in establishing and testing inputting procedures in the initial stage of the dictionary. She was also one of the key figures in setting up the conventions for the English- Chinese part of this dictionary.

A considerable number of Chinese students and others at the University of Hawai‘i helped in a variety of tasks related to the dictionary, such as inputting material, checking, and proofreading. They include O. T. Benson, Chen Xiaohua, Chu Wei, Roderich A. Gammon, He Jinli, Hu Leping, Max P. Hirsch, Huang Ying, Li Yanfeng, Li Xiangping, Lu Caixia, Nie Jiang, Matt Olsen, Pan Linlin, Kimberly M. Sato, Wang Qinghong, Wang Xiaoling, Wang Yanyan, Wu Lei, Yang Decheng, Yang Yide, Zhang Shanshan, and Zhu Kunlun. The proofreading team, led by Victor H. Mair, was assembled from individuals scattered across the world. Among them were the following: Liqing Zhang, Xu Wenkan, Jonathan M. Smith, Paula Roberts, Melvin Lee, Si Jia, Jiajia Wang, Chen Ruyan, Kenneth Yeh, Natalie Liu, Michael Sawer, Linda Li, Mi Yinan, and Endymion Wilkinson. Many scholars deserve thanks for contributions to the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary and ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary because so much of the present dictionary was based on those earlier works. They include especially Robert Hsu, James Dew, and Robert Sanders; also Timothy Connor, Denis Mair, E-tu Zen Sun, Yin Binyong, Duan Xiaoping, Li Weiping, Li Ye, Chen Jing, Gu Xiurong, Fern Aki, Paul Hacker, Han Xiaorong, Huang Bihong, Li Yuenching, Liu Jiacai, Shoshana Su, Tian Chenshan, Wan Jianing, Wang Caixiang, Wang Huijing, Wang Shaoling, Mike White, Yang I-Te, Zhang Yao, Eric Meyer, Roger P. Bissonnette, Fang Zhizeng, Xu Ruzong, Bai Yuqing, Alan Adcock, Ang Woei, Joel A. de Benoit, Nghi Duc (Bruce) Chau, Robert K. Cliver, Tom Cullen, Jeffrey J. Hayden, Mun Yin (Carol) Li, Lisa Leigh Lian, Liu Dong, Ip Hung (Kim) Mar, David Pai, Sylvia Henel Sun, Kristina L. Taber, Jianqi Wang, Kai Wang, Ye Ding, Di Zhang, Ruohong Zhang, Zheng Jie, Liu Yongquan, Ke Chuanren, Michael Carr, Chu Kuangfu, Duan Xiaoqing, Jia Yunqi, Liu Ziheng, Lo Chihong, Thomas H. Mair, Wei Xin, Apollo Wu, Xie Tianwei, Ted Yao, Zhang Zesheng, Robert Cheng, David Ashworth, Lo Chin-tang, and David W. Goodrich. Our own role as editors involved overall supervision of all aspects of the work as well as contributions to the detailed tasks in both sections of the dictionary. In all these tasks we had the invaluable help of those mentioned above, and we heartily thank them all.

—John DeFrancis, University of Hawai‘i

—Yanyin Zhang, University of Canberra, Australia; University of Hawai‘i