Among many possible deliverables of our project, we have in our working agenda at least the following items :

i) Upgrading of our two existing "syllabaries" :

Since its appearance some 60 years ago, S. L. Wong's classic A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton ( 黃錫凌《粵音韻彙》) has become an indispensable reference work for any responsible Chinese teacher in Hong Kong. However, the rather simplistic layout (initially even without any index) prevented this work from becoming more popularised. In the late seventies, the Syllabary was overhauled with an indexing system added. Around 1995, when information technology became a catchword, we gradually came up with the idea to have the Syllabary reprocessed electronically, making its hidden wealth more accessible to users over the network. This plan became realised when the de facto editor of the current printed version of the Syllabary agreed to become one of our collaborators. We used client/server, PERL scripts, javascripts and multimedia techniques to generate the first on-line version of the Syllabary on Internet. - Then in 1997, we constructed a second, much enlarged syllabary A Chinese Talking Syllabary of the Cantonese Dialect: An Electronic Repository ( 粵語音韻集成電子版 ). This time we have been able to use some data provided by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Besides a much expanded database (from 8,000 entries to 12,000), we have added further options and functions to the syllabary. With the self-made search engine, the sound database, the many indices and query options provided, and the character level linkages to other character dictionaries all over the Internet, the Syllabary has injected vital force in school language education as well as in higher level research. - On the basis of what we have done, we are now planning to incorporate more lexical information into our current syllabary databases so as to transform the syllabary into an online talking lexicon in its own right.

ii) Online edition of Lin Yu-Tang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage ( 林語堂《當代漢英詞典》網上版 )

So many years after its first publication back in 1972 by the Chinese University Press, the impact of Lin Yu-Tang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage is indisputably fading out. However, in regard of academic content and practical value, the dictionary remains in many ways uncontested and unsurpassed. Now with the permission of the Chinese University Press, we plan to reprocess the dictionary material into a network-accessible lexical tool suitable for today's use. Instead of just mechanically inputting or copy-editing the dictionary text for public access, what we plan to do will involve advance information engineering procedures which will add new features to the dictionary on the one hand and allow hidden potentials of the dictionary to be exhausted on the other. To name a few examples, the following features, not thinkable in a paper version of the dictionary, will be available by a simple mouse click: option of searching for an English instead of for a Chinese expression; searching for Chinese expressions in successive (順序搜索)as well as in reverse order (逆序搜索) searching words or lexical structures belonging to a particular meaning category (eg. figurative, Buddhistic, mythological, chemical, colloquial, derogatory etc.); choices between full text search or headword search; optional display of Wade-Giles or Pinyin transcription of Putonghua pronunciation; hyperlinkage of the headwords to our other lexical resources, and last but not least, all possible Boolean search operations etc. With all these features added, I am sure that the intrinsic value of Lin's dictionary will not just be revived, but will be brought to even greater heights. As the first and only one online lexical tool of this type in the foreseeable future, the dictionary will certainly play an important role in the promotion of biliteracy in Hong Kong. - To ensure smooth and systematic processing of our work, we have already written a program (in PERL) tailored exclusively for the editing of Lin's dictionary. This electronic workbench will also provide basis for the preparation of the second edition of the dictionary which is now being considered by the CU Press.

iii) An Integrated Database for Chinese Language Usage:

As is widely known, written symbols, spoken words, and meaning ( 形、音、義 ) are the three major elements governing the use of language. As far as language didactics is concerned, the teaching of the Chinese language (and all her dialects) faces one peculiar problem which does not constitute an issue in the teaching of Indo-European languages. In Indo-European languages, writing, speech sound, and meaning exhibit a predominantly rectilinear relationship, with writing automatically mapped to the speech, speech to our intended meaning. As a result of this, the reading of a text is a relatively easy job for an Indo-European child, as long as he/she has mastered the basic pronunciation skills. But the situation in the teaching and learning of the Chinese language is a completely different one. Unlike the case in Western languages, writing, speech sound, and meaning in Chinese exhibit a triangular relationship. Given a written sign (character) in Chinese, there is no easy guideline telling the learner how it should be pronounced., and given a character together with the correct pronunciation, we do not necessarily know its meaning. For a Chinese child to become literate, thousands of characters have to be learned in respect of both their written and sound form as well as their semantic content. Without detriment to the many structural advantages of the Chinese language, which have arouse much research interest nowadays, it is precisely this peculiarly triangular, i.e. non-rectilinear relationship which has contributed to the higher rate of illiteracy among the Chinese population. - It is out of this concern that an "integrated database for Chinese language usage" could be of help in the teaching and learning of the Chinese language. The idea behind such a database is the use of modern IT and multimedia to "tighten up" the otherwise loose relationship between writing, speech sound and meaning (i.e. orthography, phonetics, and semantics) of the Chinese characters. The database will be implemented stage by stage by integrating the computational results of the above named plans [as described in i) and ii)] with further modules appended. Modules to be added to the final database will include the production of Putonghua sound files, text-to-speech generation for both Cantonese and Putonghua, information on etymological usage, genealogy of script forms, an archive of related educational images, further linkage options to external resources etc. With all these components in place, the resultant database will be of great educational value not only to local users, but also to a huge population of users around the globe. Given the current popularity of our web services, I can foresee that our Integrated Database will very soon become a major attraction of the internet community, with impact comparable to internationally renowned sites such as the Perseus Project (Greek) of Tufts or the WordNet (English) of Princeton.

iv) Topic-specific Web pages for language education in the Hong Kong Context:

Besides more ambitious plans as given above, we will from time to time construct web pages related to specific topics of language education in the Hong Kong context. One possible example of jobs of this kind is a repository of commonly made mistakes in pronunciation and compositions, Chinese as well as English. In this connection, we can invite input from school teachers and benefit from their real life teaching experience. Another possible example is a report on the Cantonese-English bilingual language behaviour which is typical of some children growing up in Hong Kong. This kind of observation might shed light on questions such as language differentiation, comparison between monolingual and bilingual development, possibility of delay and degree of balance etc.