Hi, I just got myself the Newly Revised Edition of the Illustrated Chinese-English Dictionary, it's broken down by simplified and traditional, on the traditional side it has the way the words are pronounced in Taiwan. Such as for example trashcan 垃圾桶. For both China and Taiwan the characters remain the same for this word, however the pinyin pronunciation is different, China is la1ji1tong3, Taiwan is le4se4tong3. Is there a way to add the latter pinyin to the word in your database? My Taiwanese girlfriend/professional translator says that the latter is more common in Taiwan, though the former is not unheard of. I found a list that already has the China focussed vocabulary in it on here, from I guess the earlier edition, with the China centric pronunciation. However, I want to create a list for the Taiwan/Traditional side of the dictionary, with Taiwan pronunciation, I can't do that if I can't add the Taiwan centric pronunciation/pinyin...

Unfortunately, we don't have a way to add alternate pronunciations for multiple-character words. We just have it so that certain neutral tones can be pronounced as their full tones for the benefit of Taiwan-centered learners (for tone prompts only).

You can add the Taiwanese pronunciations as notes in your custom definitions, for what that's worth.

Is that Minnan dialect rather than putonghua? I didn't think that Taiwanese putonghua was normally that disparate...

It's 台灣國語, Byzanti.
(still waiting for 閩南 / Hokkien Skritter though)

See http://www.zhongwen.com/x/guopu.htm for a list of the differences between Taiwan and mainland pronunciations.

Yikes. Thanks!

Some thirty or forty years ago, even the mainland would pronounce 垃圾 as le4se4. After Putonghua was popularized, many people in the mainland who didn't speak Putonghua before started to speak Putonghua and spoke it wrongly. And the government simply declared those wrong pronunciations as correct. So 垃圾 now becomes la1ji1 .

@pts what you wrote reminds me that lots of mainlanders are starting to say and think that only using 的 and never using 地/得 is the "right way".

My Chinese teacher told me that using "好么？" instead of 好吗　is correct. She said that they're both correct. She's a good teacher, but I don't agree with what she said about this

@pts I was just thinking about what you wrote about the pronunciation of 垃圾. Do you happen to know of any sources that could confirm this? Something that I could use as a reference if I were ever to include this in an essay

I first heard about this from my laoshi, who finished his higher education in the mainland in the early 1960s. The author of this article http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/11399252 , also mentioned that his father and father in law, both of them had studied in the mainland, would also read the word as le4se4. That article also pointed out that the reading of the word in other dialects is much more similar to lese than to laji.

Then in the reply to this message, http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/11815973.html , we can find this sentence: “后来据说是人们老念错成la2ji1，大陆的普通话方案就干脆改成约定俗成的音了。”

There must be some dictionaries published in the 50's and 60's remaining. May be we can go to a library, dig out one of those dictionaries and look up its reading at that time.