Terminology
dichotomizes dictionaries for written and spoken forms; ''zidian'' "character/logograph dictionary" and ''cidian'' "word/phrase dictionary". For character dictionaries, ''zidian'' combines ''zi'' and ''dian'' . For word dictionaries, ''cidian'' is interchangeably written or ; using ''cí'' , and its graphic variant ''cí'' . ''Zidian'' is a much older and more common word than ''cidian'', and Yang notes ''zidian'' is often "used for both 'character dictionary' and 'word dictionary'."
Traditional Chinese lexicography
The precursors of Chinese dictionaries are primers designed for students of Chinese characters. The earliest of them only survive in fragments or quotations within Chinese classic texts. For example, the ''Shi Zhou Pian'' was compiled by one or more historians in the court of King Xuan of Zhou , and was the source of the 籀文 zhòuwén variant forms listed in the Han dynasty Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. The ''Cang Jie Pian'' , named after the legendary inventor of writing, was edited by Li Si, and helped to standardize the Small seal script during the Qin Dynasty.
The collation or lexicographical ordering of a dictionary generally depends upon its writing system. For a language written in an alphabet or syllabary, dictionaries are usually ordered alphabetically. Samuel Johnson defined ''dictionary'' as "a book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning" in . But Johnson's definition cannot be applied to the Chinese dictionaries, as Chinese is written in s or logograph, not alphabets. To Johnson, not having an alphabet is not to the Chinese's credit, as in 1778, when James Boswell asked about the Chinese characters, he replied "Sir, they have not an alphabet. They have not been able to form what all other nations have formed." Nevertheless, the Chinese made their dictionaries, and developed three original systems for lexicographical ordering: semantic categories, graphic components, and pronunciations.
Semantically organized dictionaries
The first system of dictionary organization is by semantic categories. The circa 3rd century BCE ''Erya'' is the oldest extant Chinese dictionary, and scholarship reveals that it is a pre-Qin compilation of glosses to classical texts. It contains lists of synonyms arranged into 19 semantic categories . The Han Dynasty dictionary ''Xiao Erya'' reduces these 19 to 13 chapters. The early 3rd century CE ''Guangya'' , from the Northern Wei Dynasty, followed the ''Erya'''s original 19 chapters. The circa 1080 CE ''Piya'' , from the Song Dynasty, has 8 semantically-based chapters of names for plants and animals. For a dictionary user wanting to look up a character, this arbitrary semantic system is inefficient unless one already knows, or can guess, the meaning.
Two other Han Dynasty lexicons are loosely organized by semantics. The 1st century CE ''Fangyan'' is the world's oldest known dialectal dictionary. The circa 200 CE ''Shiming'' employs paranomastic glosses to define words.
Graphically organized dictionaries
The second system of dictionary organization is by recurring graphic components or . The famous 100-121 CE ''Shuowen Jiezi'' arranged characters through a system of 540 ''bushou'' radicals. The 543 CE ''Yupian'' , from the Liang Dynasty, rearranged them into 542. The 1615 CE ''Zihui'' , edited by Mei Yingzuo during the Ming Dynasty, simplified the 540 ''Shuowen Jiezi'' radicals to 214. It also originated the "radical-stroke" scheme of ordering characters on the number of residual graphic besides the radical. The 1627 ''Zhengzitong'' also used 214. The 1716 CE ''Kangxi Zidian'' , compiled under the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, became the standard dictionary for Chinese characters, and popularized the system of . As most Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic ones , the radical method is usually effective, thus it continues to be widely used in the present day. However, sometimes the radical of a character is not obvious. To compensate this, a "Chart of Characters that Are Difficult to Look up" , arranged by the number of strokes of the characters, is usually provided.
Phonetically organized dictionaries
The third system of lexicographical ordering is by character pronunciation. This type of dictionary collates its entries by syllable rime and , and comprises the so-called "rime dictionary". The first surviving rime dictionary is the 601 CE ''Qieyun'' from the Sui Dynasty; it became the standard of pronunciation for Middle Chinese. During the Song Dynasty, it was expanded into the 1011 CE ''Guangyun'' and the 1037 CE ''Jiyun'' .
The clear problem with these old phonetically arranged dictionary is that the would-be user needs to have the knowledge of rime. Thus, dictionaries collated this way can only serve the literati.
A great number of modern dictionaries published today arrange their entries by pinyin or other methods of romanisation, together with a radicals index. Some of these pinyin dictionaries also contain indices of the characters arranged by number and order of strokes, by the or by the .
Some dictionaries employ more than one of these three methods of collation. For example, the ''Longkan Shoujian'' of the Liao Dynasty uses radicals, which are grouped by tone. The characters under each radical are also grouped by tone.
Functional classifications
Besides categorizing ancient Chinese dictionaries by their methods of collation, they can also be classified by their functions. In the traditional bibliographic divisions of the imperial collection ''Siku Quanshu'', the ''Xiaoxuelei'' subdivides dictionaries into three types: ''Xungu'' , ''Zishu'' and ''Yunshu'' .
The ''Xungu'' type comprises ''Erya'' and its descendants. These exegetical dictionaries focus on explaining meanings of words as found in the Chinese classics.
The ''Zishu'' dictionaries comprise ''Shuowen Jiezi'', ''Yupian'', ''Zihui'', ''Zhengzitong'', and ''Kangxi Zidian''. This type of dictionary, which focuses on the shape and structure of the characters, subsumes both "orthography dictionaries", such as the ''Ganlu Zishu'' of the Tang Dynasty, and " dictionaries", such as the ''Liyun'' of the Song Dynasty. Although these dictionaries center upon the graphic properties of Chinese characters, they do not necessarily collate characters by radical. For instance, ''Liyun'' is a clerical script dictionary collated by tone and rime.
The ''Yunshu'' type focuses on the pronunciations of characters. These dictionaries are always collated by rimes.
While the above traditional pre-20th century Chinese dictionaries focused upon the meanings and pronunciations of words in classical texts, they practically ignored the spoken language and vernacular literature.
Modern Chinese lexicography
The ''Kangxi Zidian'' served as the standard Chinese dictionary for generations, is still published and is now online. Contemporary lexicography is divisible between bilingual and monolingual Chinese dictionaries.
Chinese-English dictionaries
The foreigners who entered China in late Ming and Qing Dynasties needed dictionaries for different purposes than native speakers. Wanting to , they compiled the first grammar books and bilingual dictionaries. Westerners adapted the Latin alphabet to represent Chinese pronunciation, and arranged their dictionaries accordingly.
Two Bible translators edited early Chinese dictionaries. The Scottish missionary wrote Chinese-English and English-Chinese lexicons . The British missionary Walter Henry Medhurst wrote Hokkien dialect and Chinese-English dictionaries. Both were flawed in their representation of pronunciations, such as stops. The American philologist and diplomat Samuel Wells Williams applied the method of dialect comparison in his dictionary , and refined distinctions in articulation.
The British diplomat and linguist Herbert Giles compiled a lexicon that Norman calls "the first truly adequate Chinese-English dictionary". It contained 13,848 characters and numerous compound expressions, with pronunciation based upon Beijing Mandarin, which it compared with nine southern dialects such as , , and . Giles modified the Chinese romanization system of Thomas Francis Wade to create the Wade-Giles system, which was standard in the West until 1979 when pinyin was adopted. The American missionary Robert H. Mathews updated and condensed Giles for his Chinese-English dictionary, which was popular for decades.
Trained in American Structural linguistics, Yuen Ren Chao and Lien-sheng Yang wrote a dictionary of colloquial Chinese that emphasized the spoken rather than the written language. Main entries were listed in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and they detailed grammatical topics like free morphemes and bound morphemes.
The Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren wrote the seminal ''Grammata Serica Recensa'' with his reconstructed pronunciations for Middle Chinese and Old Chinese.
Chinese lexicography advanced during the 1970s. The translator Lin Yutang wrote a semantically sophisticated dictionary that is now available online. The author edited two full-scale dictionaries: Chinese-English with over 8,000 characters and 100,000 entries, and English-Chinese with over 160,000 entries.
The linguist and professor of Chinese, John DeFrancis edited a groundbreaking Chinese-English dictionary giving more than 196,000 entries alphabetically arranged in a single-sort pinyin order - the project that had long been advocated by another pinyin proponent, Victor H. Mair .
Chinese-Chinese dictionaries
When the Republic of China began in 1912, educators and scholars recognized the need to update the 1716 ''Kangxi Zidian''. It was thoroughly revised in the ''Zhonghua Da Zidian'' , which corrected over 4,000 ''Kangxi Zidian'' mistakes and added more than 1,000 new characters. Lu Erkui's ''Ci Yuan'' was a groundbreaking effort in Chinese lexicography and can be considered the first ''cidian'' "word dictionary".
Shu Xincheng's ''Cihai'' was a comprehensive dictionary of characters and expressions, and provided near-encyclopedic coverage in fields like science, philosophy, history. The ''Cihai'' remains a popular dictionary and has been frequently revised.
The ''Guoyu cidian'' was a four-volume dictionary of words, designed to standardize modern pronunciation. The main entries were characters listed phonologically by Zhuyin Fuhao and Gwoyeu Romatzyh. For example, the title in these systems is ㄍㄨㄛㄩ ㄘㄉ一ㄢ and Gwoyeu tsyrdean.
Wei Jiangong's ''Xinhua Zidian'' is a pocket-sized reference, alphabetically arranged by pinyin. It is the world's most popular dictionary, and the 10th edition was published in 2004.
Lu Shuxiang's ''Xiandai Hanyu cidian'' is a middle-sized dictionary of words. It is arranged by characters, alphabetized by pinyin, which list compounds and phrases, with a total 56,000 entries . Both the ''Xinhua zidian'' and the ''Xiandai Hanyu cidian'' followed a simplified scheme of 189 radicals.
Two outstanding achievements in contemporary Chinese lexicography are the ''Hanyu Da Cidian'' with over 370,000 word and phrase entries listed under 23,000 different characters; and the ''Hanyu Da Zidian'' with 54,678 head entries for characters. They both use a system of 200 radicals.
In recent years, the computerization of Chinese has allowed lexicographers to create ''dianzi cidian'' usable on computers, PDAs, etc. There are proprietary systems, such as Wenlin Software for learning Chinese, and there are also free dictionaries available online. After Paul Denisowski started the volunteer CEDICT project in 1997, it has grown into a standard reference database. The CEDICT is the basis for many Internet dictionaries of Chinese, and is included in the Unihan Database.
Specialized dictionaries
Chinese publishing houses print diverse types of ''zhuanke cidian'' . One Chinese dictionary bibliography lists over 130 subject categories, from "Abbreviations, Accounting" to "Veterinary, Zoology." The following examples are limited to specialized dictionaries from a few representative fields.
For dialects
Twenty centuries ago, the ''Fangyan'' was the first Chinese specialized dictionary. The usual English translation for ''fangyan'' is "dialect", but the language situation in China is uniquely complex. In the "dialect" sense of English dialects, Chinese has Mandarin dialects, yet ''fangyan'' also means "non-Mandarin languages, mutually unintelligible regional variants of Spoken Chinese", such as and . Some linguists like John DeFrancis prefer the translation "topolect". Here are some general ''fangyan cidian'' examples.
*Beijing University Chinese Department. Hanyu Fangyin Zihui Beijing: Wenzi Gaige Chubanshe. 1962.
*Beijing University Chinese Department. ''Hanyu fangyan cihui'' . Beijing: Wenzi Gaige Chubanshe. 1964.
*Xu Baohua 许宝华 and Miyata Ichiroo 宫田一郎, eds. ''Hanyu fangyan da cidian'' . Beijing: Zhonghua Shuzhu. 1999.
*Zhan Bohui 詹伯慧, ed. ''Xiandai Hanyu fangyan da cidian'' . Qianjiang: Hubei Renmin Chubanshe. 2002.
For idioms
Chinese has five words translatable as "idiom": ''chengyu'' , ''yanyu'' , ''xiehouyu'' , ''xiyu'' , and ''guanyongyu'' . Some modern dictionaries for idioms are:
*Li Yihua 李一华 and Lu Deshen吕德申, eds. ''Hanyu chengyu cidian'' . Sichuan Cishu Chubanshe. 1985.
*Wang Qin 王勤, ed. ''Fenlei Hanyu chengyu da cidian'' . Shandong jiaoyu. 1988.
*Li Xingjian 李行健, ed. ''Xiandai Hanyu chengyu guifan cidian'' . Changqun Chubanshe. 2000.
*Zhang Yipeng 张一鹏, ed. ''Yanyu da dian'' . Shanghai: Hanyu dacidian Chubanshe. 2004.
*Wen Duanzheng 温端政. ''Zhongguo yanyu da quan'' , 2 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai Cishu. 2004.
For loanwords
The Chinese language adopted a few foreign ''wailaici'' during the Han Dynasty, especially after Zhang Qian's exploration of the Western Regions. The lexicon absorbed many Buddhist terms and concepts when Chinese Buddhism began to flourish in the Southern and Northern Dynasties. During the late 19th century, when Western powers forced open China's doors, numerous loanwords entered Chinese, many through the Japanese language. While some foreign borrowings became obsolete, others became indispensable terms in modern vocabulary.
*Cen Qixiang 岑麒祥 ed. ''Hanyu Wailaiyu Cidian'' . Beijing: Commercial Press. 1990.
*Liu Zhengtan 劉正談, et al. eds. ''Hanyu Wailaici Cidian'' . Hong Kong: Commercial Press; Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe. 1985.
*Shi Youwei 史有为, ed. ''Hanyu wailaici'' . Beijing: Commercial Press. 2000.
For vernacular literature
The 20th century saw the rapid progress of the studies of the lexicons found in the Chinese vernacular literature, which includes novels, dramas and poetry. Important works in the field include:
*Zhang Xiang 張相, ''Shiciqu Yuci Huishi'' . Pioneering work in the field, completed in 1945 but published posthumously in 1954 in Shanghai by Zhonghua Book Company. Many reprints.
*Jiang Lihong 蔣禮鴻, ''Dunhuang Bianwen Ziyi Tongshi'' , revised and enlarged edition with supplements. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. 1997. First published 1962.
*Wang Ying 王锳, ''Shiciqu Yuci Lishi'' , 2nd revised and enlarged edition. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company. 2005. First published 1980.
*Gu Xuejie 顧學頡 & Wang Xueqi 王學奇, ''Yuanqu Shici'' . Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. 1983-1990. 4 volumes.
*Wang Ying 王锳, ''Tangsong Biji Yuci Huishi'' , revised edition. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company. 2001. First published 1990.
*Wang Ying 王锳, ''Songyuanming Shiyu Huishi'' . Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe. 1997.
*Fang Linggui 方龄贵, ''Gudian Xiqu Wailaiyu Kaoshi Cidian'' . Shanghai: Hanyu da cidian chubanshe; Kunming: Yunnan daxue chubanshe. 2001. First published in 1991 as ''Yuanming Xiqu Zhong De Mengguyu'' by Shanghai: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe. Covering mainly the loanwords form Mongolian.
For Chinese learners
Employing corpus linguistics and lists of Chinese characters arranged by frequency of usage , lexicographers have compiled dictionaries for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. These specialized Chinese dictionaries are available either as add-ons to existing publications like Yuan and Wenlin or as specific ones like
*Fenn, Courtenay H. and Hsien-tseng Chin. 1926. ''The Five Thousand Dictionary; A Chinese-English Pocket Dictionary''. Mission Book Company. 1942. rev. American ed. Harvard University Press. 1973. 13th reprinting.
*Huang, Po-fei. 1973. ''IFEL Vocabulary of Spoken Chinese''. Yale University Far Eastern Publications.
*Liu, Eric Shen. 1973. ''Frequency dictionary of Chinese words ''. Mouton.
*Ho, Yong. 2001. ''Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary: A Study Guide to Mandarin Chinese's 500 Most Frequently Used Words''. Hippocrene Books.
Online Chinese dictionaries
* Online Chinese English Dictionary
*, Online Dictionary
*, Mandarintools
*
*, Rick Harbaugh
*, Chinese University of Hong Kong
*, ''Guoyu cidian''
*, ''Kangxi zidian''
* Classical Chinese character usage dictionary
* a Wikipedia-style language portal
No comments:
Post a Comment