Hi amhoanna,
Thanks a lot for the link. The OCR'ing of the PDF in the electronic version available on CD-ROM is actually quite good on the English part, but hopeless in the POJ part, as the OCR-program they used was not diacritic-enabled ("ó" often gets misinterpreted as "d", etc). So, in the CD-ROM version, the only Hokkien terms which can be searched for are tone-1 terms (and even then, superscript-n usually comes out as the double quote <">).
So, up to now, I could electronically search for English words, but not POJ ones (to say nothing of hanzi). Now this site will enable me to do both (though I guess I'll have to use TLPA, as I imagine that's what they mean by Tâi-gí Lô-má-jī).
Yes, indeed, Douglas is the dictionary I constantly rave about. That man did an amazing job. I wrote the text below to a friend recently, when I was praising the Douglas to him:
"The guy [Douglas] had no computer to edit with in 1870, and he has managed to record *thousands* of syllable-morphemes, and under each, he has *hundreds* of ciyu. And he was doing this along with his day job as a missionary! And everything I read in Douglas which I can verify against my own real-life knowledge I find to be correct! With an amazing depth and breadth of coverage - obscure animals and plants and dishes (i.e. foods); hundreds of obscure religious customs; lots of obscure technical terms ("the knob that protrudes from the tops of beds of unmarried daughters in the homes of rich families", etc), regionalisms ("but called X in counties A and B of Prefecture C"). And all this done with next to no typos! A truly phenomenal work!"
So, yes, I'm a devoted fan of the man
.
PS. "the knob that protrudes from the tops of beds of unmarried daughters in the homes of rich families" is not a real entry in his dictionary
.
Ordered the book & CD right away after I saw your recommendations. I don't think a day has gone by since without me using it 