Re: [edict-jmdict] Revisiting field tags

[Nils Roland Barth <jmdict.nbarth@********>]

Jim Breen:
> A couple of issues have cropped up with the expanded field tags.
> 
> (a) the new "eng" (engineering) and "fin" (finance) tags clash with
> the table of ISO 639 language codes (English and Finnish). That
> means either they need to be changed, or they have to be
> enetered as "[fld=eng]" instead of just "[eng], etc.
> 
> It might be best to change them now, before they are actually used.
> How about "engr" and "finc"?

Avoiding clashes sounds good, and engr/finc sound good.
Safest would be to generally use 4+ letter codes, but that’s
probably overkill. (“law” is fine – don’t need “legl”)

> René has raised the issue of the "med" tag being used for entries
> covering anatomical terms that can apply to non-humans.
> See:
> http://www.edrdg.org/jmdictdb/cgi-bin/entr.py?svc=jmdict&sid=&q=1567320
> The description of "med" could be expanded to make it clear it includes
> anatomical terms, but it might be easier to add "anat" to the field set.
> Any views on this?

A separate [anat] tag would be helpful (GG5 includes it).
As Rene notes, [med] tends to suggest “human medicine”,
and [anat] is a conceptually distinct category (body parts).

(I’d be happy to clean up [med] terms to fix them to [anat];
 I think I’ve tagged a number lately…)


On another note, I’ve been reminded lately of the massive
number of fish names in Japanese.
This is a rather distinctive feature of the language,
especially as these very frequently appear on menus, and
often feature species that are unfamiliar in English.
(Arabesque greenling? Really? ホッケ 𩸽)

So a [fish] tag would be helpful…
(without end, we end up appending (fish) to all the weird
 species names)

(We want to avoid having too many idiosyncratic categories,
 but fish are really big in Japan and in Japanese.)

BTW, a list of 魚偏 kanji, for people interested in such things:
http://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~mxk121/research/data/sakana.html


best,
  ~nils