Should we add the enhancement from japanese.SE for furigana/ruby text here for adding Pinyin to hanzi?

Question

Early in the history of japanese.SE one user created an enhancement that made it easy for editors to include phonetic spelling with Han characters. It was so popular that Stack Exchange took it and made it a standard feature of the site.

In Japanese you typically add Japanese phonetic script (hiragana and katakana) to characters (known as Kanji in Japanese). This is common not just in material for learners but also for Japanese readers where it will be added just for the the obscure characters that many Japanese might not know how to pronounce. This is known as either "furigana" or "ruby text".

The same thing is not so common in Chinese text, but it's still possible. And since many of us using chinese.SE are learners who find Pinyin less difficult (though still not always easy) than Hanzi, it would still be of benefit.

It does not automatically decide the pinyin for the characters, the editor has to specifically include it using some simple formatting.

The result is that the pinyin would be displayed abover the characters, so easy to ignore for people who can read hanzi well enough. At present we right the hanzi and pinyin next to each other, or in one recent post the editor "interleaved" the characters and pinyin one-by-one, which is not very easy to read.

What do others think?

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I've started a topic on the Japanese JL&U so our interested users here can discuss the feature with the users there, and see how it works. Currently it does not "just work" for Pinyin, but we might found out if they can modify it easily to work.

Answer 1

I've hacked together a derivative of the JLU script that should work rudimentarily as a proof-of-concept. You can download it from this pastebin link and install it however you usually install userscripts in your browser. I haven't tested this besides in Chrome, so if it doesn't work in another recent browser, let me know.

Basically, I removed support for okurigana and pitch accent (since, as far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have those things) and added auto-conversion for things like zhong1wen2 to zhōngwén (as Don Kirkby requested). (I also made the regexes a bit more readable - more on that later.)

Structurally, this script behaves like the JLU helper script. You can write things like:

象形字{xiàngxíngzì}
指事字{zhi3shi4zi4}
会[意]{yì}字
假借{jia3jie4}字{zi4}

and if you have the script enabled, these things automagically convert to furigana-style annotations:

If you include the pinyin in "numeric" form (like the second and fourth examples above), it will also automatically be segmented so that each syllable is placed above its corresponding character.

Since my knowledge of Chinese orthography is extremely minimal, I need to know some more things in order to improve this:

1. Can pinyin written in "diacritic" form (like the first and third examples above) be unambiguously broken into syllables (by itself, without reference to the characters)? If so, I can figure out how to implement automatic segmentation for diacritic-form pinyin.
2. Does this site cover Chinese languages besides Mandarin, and if so, would there be any demand for tonal annotations for other languages? I don't know anything at all about languages besides Mandarin, so I'd need pointers to some basic resources on orthography.
3. On JLU, there's also support for annotations of the form 神【かみ】 (in addition to square brackets []) because that's how dictionaries do it. Does Chinese have any similar practices that ought to be supported?
4. On JLU, the following characters behave like punctuation for the purposes of the helper script: .、。－-／｡＜＞（）\(\)≪≫；;：:！!＝=≡≠≒＄￥？\?＆＃#＠@“‘”’. Are there any additional punctuation characters for Chinese?
5. Are there any characters that would require annotation outside the UTF-8 range from U+4E00 to U+FEED? That's what JLU uses, and it seems to cover all common CJK characters, but the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension ranges fall outside that, and I don't know if you folks would need that. (If you're not familiar with Unicode ranges, take a look at this site.)

If this turns out to be useful to you folks, hopefully some friendly SE employee will come by and implement this properly at some point in the future.

Answer 2

A Community Manager has added this to the:

Community Management Team's backlog

There is no ETA on when it will be looked at and/or taken care of, but at least we can be assured that it's not lost in the pile of meta posts.

Answer 3

I think it would be a nice option when you particularly want to discuss the pronunciation of a character, but I wouldn't use it regularly.

To help people visualize what it would look like, I posted an example of pinyin in ruby text at GitHub. If the feature supported converting zhong1wen2 to zhōngwén that would make it easier to use.

Answer 4

Thanks to @senshin for drafting up an idea of what the enhancement should look like. I've noted what I think the enhancement should support at Japanese SE Meta (it's easier to demonstrate ruby text there).

Suggestions/corrections welcome.

Answer 5

Based on our current roadmap, this isn't work that we will take on, as it doesn't coincide with functional areas that we plan to improve in the near future. We recognize that time and thought was put into this request, but unfortunately, we can't prioritize it at this time.