Sinosplice Tooltips WordPress Plug-In

Tech-Geeky and a WordPress fan-user I might be, but I don’t seek news of the latest WordPress plug-ins. However, I follow John’s/Sinosplice blog and knew from the “start” that he was developing a WordPress plug-in to deliver a cool feature he has long had on his blog: hover over Chinese characters in the text and a bubble appears with the characters repeated larger followed by the pinyin pronunciation.

So when John announced the official release of his Sinosplice Tooltips plug-in, it was something that I believed in enough to try as an early adopter. It didn’t work right away for me, the transparency feature was wonky with my Arthemia WordPress theme or some weird conflict and the tech(s) at Techni Orchid (co-developers?) rapidly fixed the issue and I was on my way–yay!

So what’s the point of this post if I don’t have some examples?

This tooltip will show the Mandarin pinyin for “what”: 甚麼

This tooltip will show the Cantonese pronunciation for “what”: 甚麼

This tooltip will show the Cantonese pronunciation for the Cantonese variant for “what”: 乜嘢

So, it was only in the writing of this post that I realized that by no means am I limited to displaying pinyin in the bubble! Besides the added value I already find using the tooltips, this makes the plug-in even cooler!

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p.s. A quick way to find common Cantonese words and their pronunciations is, of course, a Wikipedia page: Cantonese phrasebook