Ubuntu 14.04 Chinese SunPinyin / Pinyin: Fixes

Chinese input is fun, for the warped mind that I am. Yes, it is exceptionally difficult to learn Chinese, but after that little hurdle, and significant eye strain, it is fun. Chinese input methods on Ubuntu 14.04 is somewhat confusing, as it is very easy to install, both for SunPinyin and Pinyin yet there are bugs. I installed SunPinyin, and when I could not input certain characters, also installed Pinyin. Here are the ones I found, and their fixes.

Pinyin Joe has installation instructions for Chinese, and the very many input methods. He also has a page for Ubuntu 14.04 Chinese bugs. This fixed the “学” xue bug in Pinyin, but not in SunPinyin.

ibus-daemon -drx

The “学” xue bug occurs when I am in SunPinyin, Chinese, and type “xue” but get “xiong” characters. This did occur with both SunPinyin and Pinyin. The fix for Pinyin was the “ibus-daemon -drx” command, done on Terminal. This did not fix SunPinyin.

I found a thread about this
“jue”,”que”,”xue” mapped to “jiong”, “qiong”, “xiong” in 14.04 error.
OS: Ubuntu Desktop 14.04

When inputting Chinese by SunPinYin, I found following item are mapped in wrong way:

“`
jue => jiong
que => qiong
xue => xiong
“`

The last poster, doit (richangyongpin), wrote a shell script that fixed the issue. Download, or open up gedit, paste in and save in a directory, resolve.sh. Open up your Terminal, go to your saved directory and input “sh resolve.sh”. You will be asked to continue, and then the script will run. It solved my “学” xue error.

Both SunPinyin and Pinyin have almost no documentation, and what is there on Google Code is in Chinese. If you know of any documentation on SunPinyin or Pinyin, please let me know. The preferences for both input methods is a little complex and not easy to understand.

I had an issue with inputting the character “女“ nü. I would input “nu” and the character “女“ would not be in the choices. After a long search a Wiki posting on pinyin had the answer, under the section “The ü sound”.

Many fonts or output methods do not support an umlaut for ü or cannot place tone marks on top of ü. Likewise, using ü in input methods is difficult because it is not present as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasons v is sometimes used instead by convention. For example, it is common for cellphones to use v instead of ü. Additionally, some stores in China use v instead of ü in the transliteration of their names. The drawback is that there are no tone marks for the letter v.

I tried “nv” instead of “nu” and the character “女“ appeared in both SunPinyin and Pinyin. Yay! Now my writing can be balanced with both 男 and 女 weighting. It turns out that Pinyin Joe has much more info on the umlaut for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Addendum: 2018 Apr 21 A friend wishes to romanize the word “律”, which is lü, (“U” with Diaresis (Umlaut, Ü & ü). His Chinese friends have romanized to “lv”, which is not pinyin. I told him to use “lu”, which is pinyin, but not specific enough for the word. “lv” is only used in the input system, but not in the romanization. There is a problem.

This article, a reference from wikipedia says that the police are using “lyu” in passports and not “lv” or “lu”

In order to facilitate the distinction, the Ministry of Public Security’s Exit-Entry Administration Bureau issued notices that the new passports should be spelled “LYU”.

“Lü spelled “LU” is easily confused with “LU” (Land), etc. “LV” is an adaptation of the convenience of keyboard spelling. There is no spelling of “LV” in Pinyin, and it cannot be read in Pinyin. “

It might not be academic, but it is legal, under the Ministry of Public Security’s Exit-Entry Administration Bureau: “lyu”