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Chinese dictionaries date back over two millennia to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, which is a significantly longer lexicographical history than any other language. There are hundreds of dictionaries for Chinese, and this article will introduce some of the most important. For additional information, see Jerry Norman (1988:170-180) for an overview or Paul Fu-mien Yang (1985) for a scholarly bibliography.
Chinese dichotomizes dictionaries for written and spoken forms; zidian "character/logograph dictionary" and cidian "word/phrase dictionary". For character dictionaries, zidian () combines zi (字 "character, graph; letter, script, writing; word") and dian (典 "dictionary, encyclopedia; standard, rule; statute, canon; classical allusion"). For word dictionaries, cidian is interchangeably written (辭典/辞典; cídiǎn; tz'u-tien; "word dictionary") or (詞典/词典; cídiǎn; tz'u-tien; "word dictionary"); using cí (辭; "word, speech; phrase, expression; diction, phraseology; statement; a kind of poetic prose; depart; decline; resign"), and its graphic variant cí (詞; "word, term; expression, phrase; speech, statement; part of speech; a kind of tonal poetry"). Zidian is a much older and more common word than cidian, and Yang (1985:xxii) notes zidian is often "used for both 'character dictionary' and 'word dictionary'."
The precursors of Chinese dictionaries are primers designed for childern to learn Chinese characters. The earliest of them only survive in fragments or quotations within Chinese classic texts. For example, the Shi Zhou Pian (史籀篇 "Compilation by Historian Zhou") was supposedly written by Shi Zhou, a scribe or historian in the court of King Xuan of Zhou (r. 827 BCE- 782 BCE), and is associated with the Large seal script. Or, the Cang Jie Pian (倉頡篇 "Compilation by Cang Jie"), 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 order of a dictionary depends upon its writing system. For a language written in an alphabet or syllabary, dictionaries are usually ordered alphabetically. Samuel Johnson, who held a low opinion of the Chinese writing system,[1] defined "dictionary" in his dictionary as "a book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning." But for a language like Chinese that is written with characters or logographs, how can a dictionary be internally arranged? The Chinese developed three original systems for lexicographical ordering: semantic categories, graphic components, and pronunciations.
The first system of dictionary organization is by semantic categories. The circa 3rd century BCE Erya (爾雅 "Approaching Correctness") is 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 (e.g., "Explaining Plants," "Explaining Trees"). The Han Dynasty dictionary Xiao Erya (小爾雅 "Little Erya") reduces these 19 to 13 chapters. The early 3rd century CE Guangya (廣雅 "Expanded Erya"), from the Northern Wei Dynasty, followed the Eryas original 19 chapters. The circa 1080 CE Piya (埤雅 "Increased Erya"), 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 (方言 "Regional Speech") is the world's oldest known dialectal dictionary. The circa 200 CE Shiming (釋名 "Explaining Names") employs paranomastic glosses to define words.
The second system of dictionary organization is by recurring graphic components or radicals. The famous 100-121 CE Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字 "Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters") arranged characters through a system of 540 bushou (部首 "section header") radicals. The 543 CE Yupian (玉篇 "Jade Chapters"), from the Liang Dynasty, rearranged them into 542. The 1615 CE Zihui (字彙 "Character Glossary"), edited by Mei Yingzuo (梅膺祚) 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 strokes besides the radical. The 1627 Zhengzitong (正字通 "Correct Character Mastery") also used 214. The 1716 CE Kangxi Zidian (康熙字典 "Kangxi Dictionary"), compiled under the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, became the standard dictionary for Chinese characters, and popularized the system of 214 radicals. As most Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic ones (形聲字), 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 transparent. To compensate this, a "Chart of Characters that Are Difficult to Look up" (難檢字表), arranged by the number of strokes of the characters, is usually provided.
The third system of lexicographical ordering is by character pronunciation. This type of dictionary collates its entries by syllable rime and tones, and comprises the so-called "rime dictionary". The first surviving rime dictionary is the 601 CE Qieyun (切韻 "Cutting [Spelling] Rimes") 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 (廣韻 "Expanded Rimes") and the 1037 CE Jiyun (集韻 "Collected Rimes").
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 four corner encoding (四角碼) or by the cangjie encoding (倉頡碼).
Some dictionaries employ more than one of these three methods of collation. For example, the Longkan Shoujian (龍龕手鑑) of the Liao Dynasty uses radicals, which are grouped by tone. The characters under each radical are also grouped by tone.
While we can classify the ancient Chinese dictionaries according to the method of collation they employ, we can also classify them by their functions. In the imperial collection Siku Quanshu, under the tag of Xiaoxuelei (小學類 "Category of the Elementary Studies", which comprises linguistic works), the works are further divided into three types: Xungu (訓詁 "exegesis"), Zishu (字書 "character book") and Yunshu (韻書 "rime book").
The Xungu type comprises Erya and its descendants, which focus on the meaning of words.
The Zishu type comprises Shuowen Jiezi, Yupian, Zihui, Zhengzitong, and Kangxi Zidian. This type of dictionary focuses on the shape and structure of the characters. Thus, it also comprises the "orthography dictionary", such as the Ganlu Zishu (干祿字書) of the Tang Dynasty, and the "script dictionary", such as the Liyun (隸韻) of the Song Dynasy. Though focusing on the graphic properties of the characters, this type of dictonary does not necessarily collate the characters by radical. For instance, Liyun is a clerical script dictionary collated by tone and rime.
The Yunshu type focuses on the pronunication of the characters. They 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.
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.
The foreigners who entered China in late Ming and Qing Dynasties needed dictionaries for different purposes than native speakers. Wanting to learn Chinese, they compiled the first grammar 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 Robert Morrison wrote Chinese-English and English-Chinese lexicons (1815-1823). The British missionary Walter Henry Medhurst wrote Hokkien dialect (1832) and Chinese-English (1842) dictionaries. Both were flawed in their representation of pronunciations, such as aspirated stops. The American philologist and diplomat Samuel Wells Williams applied the method of dialect comparison in his dictionary (1874), and refined distinctions in articulation.
The British diplomat and linguist Herbert Giles compiled a lexicon (1892, 1912) that Norman (1988:173) 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 Hakka, Cantonese, and Min. 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 (1931, 1943) 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 (1947) 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 (1957) 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 (1972) that is now available online. The author Liang Shiqiu edited two full-scale dictionaries: Chinese-English (Liang and Fang 1971) with over 8,000 characters and 100,000 entries, and English-Chinese (Liang 1975) with over 160,000 entries.
The linguist and professor of Chinese, John DeFrancis edited a groundbreaking Chinese-English dictionary (1996) giving more than 196,000 entries alphabetically arranged in a single-sort pinyin order.
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 (1915) Zhonghua Da Zidian (中華大字典 "Comprehensive Chinese Character Dictionary"), which corrected over 4,000 Kangxi Zidian mistakes and added more than 1,000 new characters. Lu Erkui's (1915) Ci Yuan (辭源 "Sources of Words") was a groundbreaking effort in Chinese lexicography and can be considered the first cidian "word dictionary".
Shu Xincheng's (1936) Cihai (辭海 "Sea of Words") 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 (1937) Guoyu cidian (國語辭典 "Dictionary of the National Language") 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 (1953) Xinhua Zidian (新华字典 "New China Character Dictionary") 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 (1973) Xiandai Hanyu cidian (现代汉语词典 "Contemporary Chinese Dictionary") 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 (expanded to 65,000 in the 2005 edition). 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 (1986-93) Hanyu Da Cidian (漢語大詞典 "Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese Words") with over 370,000 word and phrase entries listed under 23,000 different characters; and the (1986-89) Hanyu Da Zidian (漢語大字典 "Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese Characters") 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 (電子詞典/电子词典 "electronic dictionaries") usable on computers, PDAs, etc. There are proprietary systems, such as Wenlin Software for learning Chinese, and there are also free dictionaries available online. Paul Denisowski started the volunteer CEDICT (Chinese-English dictionary) project in 1997. It has grown into a standard reference, and many Internet dictionaries of Chinese are based on CEDICT. It is included in the Unihan Database.
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:
A small number of foreign words found their way into Chinese during the Han Dynasty after Zhang Qian's exploration of the Western Regions. A great deal of Buddhist terms entered Chinese after the Southern and Northern Dynasties, when the religion began to flourish in China. During the late 19th century, when China's door was forced open by the West, a huge amount of loanwords, many through Japanese, entered Chinese. Many of them have become obsolete, while others an indispensable part of modern Chinese vocabulary.
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