Dear Frank,

MDBG, like Yellow Bridge, are excellent Chinese language tools, and easy to
use.

The English-Pali-English dictionary is not so useful fcor at least two
reasons:
(1) the definitions are very limited, sometimes inaccurate, eg dhammavamsa
is translated as "reciter" but better translate as "dhamma lineage". The
niggahiita is also missing.
(2) my search for "vesaarajja" failed.

I susupect it is a publicity ploy for the Babylon translation software.

In fact, this website has some really excellent dictionaries (the best I
would say) for Pali, Sanskrit-English is that of Monier Williams, and also
siddham, Chinese, and Tibetan:

http://tongphuockhai.wordpress.com/
With metta,

Piya

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 1:36 AM, frank <fcckuan@...> wrote:

>
>
> I found this online pali dictionary which I find quite useful:
>
> http://www.dicts.info/dictionary.php?l1=English&l2=Pali&word=%C4%81t%C4%81p%C4%AB+&Search=Search
>
> It's English-pali, also pali-english . I don't have to switch modes, I
> can just cut and paste a unicode pali word (with diacritics), or type in
> an english word and it will look it up. This is something that I hope
> catches on for international dictionaries, including pali.
>
> If you want to be really impressed with what a dictionary can do, check
> out this bad boy:
>
>
> http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=bodhisattva
>
> (it's a chinese-english, english-chinese, pinyin, batch word lookup
> converter all built into one)
>
> I can search for :
> bodhisattva
> or 薩 ,
> or "pu2 sa4" (pin yin phonetic spelling with tones)
> traditional chinese character or mainland simplified character
>
> without having to navigate any menus to switch between pinyin,
> chinese->english, english->chinese.
> Just type in whatever you want to search for or cut and paste into the
> search box and it goes and finds what you want.
>
> If you look at the web page for "bodhisattva" that I linked above, each
> word has 6 icons for further detailed info about the word. There's a
> speaker icon, which will play a sound file of how to pronounce the
> word(s) (or phrase), an icon to pull up a google search, an icon that
> pulls up a list of sample sentences using that word, the icon magnifying
> glass will show you the etymology of bodhisattva, that is, the chinese
> 薩 is a transliteration of the "satt" in bodhisattva.
>
> Eventually all international dictionaries are going to figure out this
> is a good way to do things. For the pali world, this would be like DPR
> integrating Lennart's translation tool, the world tipitaka audio
> dictionary all rolled up into one simple tool. without having to dial
> knobs or switches to get it to understand what you want. You just type
> in "ātāpī" or "aataapii" or "strenous" and it goes and looks it up, and
> plays an audio file with perfect pali pronunciation, shows the etymology
> of the word, synonyms, antonyms, sample sentences, shows a picture of
> mahakassapa or a non-smiling mahasi-style monk looking serious about
> their practice :)
>
>
>



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