Chinese-English Dictionary (Harvard-Yenching Institutes publications) [Hardcover]

Mathews* Chinese-English Dictionary

The interest in the study of the Chinese language in the West owes much to the pioneering linguistic efforts of the early China Missions following the opening up of China, especially since her humiliating Opium War of 1840-1842. There was then, as is now, the dire need for a standardised version of romanised Chinese characters that would facilitate both Gospel dissemination and Chinese studies in the interest of commerce and cultural intercourse.

As early as 1874, the first Chinese-English dictionary, Syllabic Dictionary by S.W. Williams appeared, followed shortly by Baller*s Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary in 1900. The romanisation, however, was anything but standard. It was not until the seminal works both of Wade*s Syllabary and H. A. Giles* Chinese-English Dictionary that a standard romanisation of the Chinese characters was introduced to foreign students of Chinese language.

The Wade-Giles system was in the main based on the educated Peking dialect without its colloquial and slang complications, also known as guoyu (national language) under the Chinese Nationalist Government or putonghua (common language) under the Communist Government. The Nationalists first adopted zhuyin (phonetic spelling) as a phonetic guide to the pronunciation of Chinese characters, notably in their initial approval in 1913 of 24 shengmu (initial consonants) and 15 yunmu (single and compound vowels) as the basis of zhuyin zimu (phonetic alphabet) or guoyin zimu (national alphabet). By 1920, one of the 15 vowels was split into two parts, thus making up a total of 16 vowels or an alphabet of 40 letters, collectively known since 1930 as zhuyin fuhao (phonetic symbols) instead of the customary zhuyin zimu (phonetic letters). It is the same phonetic system still prevailing in Nationalist Taiwan. Meanwhile, the Communist Government on the mainland has since the founding of the People*s Republic in 1949 opted for Latinisation and called its phonetic system as pinyin (alphabetic system of writing). Whereas the Nationalist zhuyin uses symbols that look totally unlike any European language and worse still, have no any universally acceptable romanisation, the Communist pinyin starts with a distinct advantage of the English alphabet readily acceptable to the Europeans if not the masses of non-English speaking Chinese peasantry. It is debatable to say which phonetic system is superior to or better than the other in terms of easy use and popularity. Pinyin further makes things unnecessarily difficult by substituting simplified characters (jiantizi) for the traditional complex characters (fantizi) as a complementary measure of the Communist drive to eliminating illiteracy in politico-ideological perspectives. The implication of this two-prong attack on education is that the younger generation brought up to learn simplified characters in pinyin is ignorant of complex characters, and again by implication, classical Chinese and hieroglyphics (xiangxing wenzi), the very foundation of the Chinese language. However, the pinyin and its Wade-Giles and zhuyin counterparts share one thing in common: the discreet use of the traditional four tonal marks to distinguish one from the others of the same character, often with different meaning and usage as well.

The Mahews* Chinese-English Dictionary under review is based on an improved and enlarged version of the earlier Wade-Giles dictionaries. Other things being equal, it has two definite advantage over pinyin in continuing the tradition of complex characters required for classical reading, and in facilitating online computerisation by the simple process of non-aggregation of compound words. It is no accident that the world*s largest library database of Chinese books is still catalogued in Wade-Giles by, and available online from, the formidable threesome of OCLC (Online Computer Library Centre, Inc. Ohio), RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) of RLG (Research Libraries Group, Mountain View, Ca.), and the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The Mathews* Chinese-English Dictionary is also a work of impeccable scholarship and copious cross-references to tones and textural annotations in its own right.

In contrast, the pinyin, which proves popular in Europe where university teaching of Chinese is concerned, not least because it does away all Wade-Giles diacritical marks except umlaut and also arranges the vocabulary in a straight sensible alphabetical sequence, fails on at least three counts that offset much of its neat appearances over Wade-Giles. The first is those awkward spellings that begin with Q,R,X,Z. Secondly, unlike the Wade-Giles system that breaks up a compound word into its single component syllables joined by hyphens where appropriate for the sake of clarity of meaning, the pinyin aggregates a compound as if it were a single pinyin word. It is also an aggregation without an agreed standard. This makes catalogue filing and computerised Boolean search difficult and inconsistent in a way the non-aggregated Wade-Giles does not. Thirdly, it still has to fall back on zhuyin and the four tonal marks as indispensable supplementary aids.

Like the pinyin, the Wade-Giles based Mathews* Chinese-English Dictionary is far from perfect. But it is still a good romanised tool for the study of traditional complex Chinese characters and phrases, the importance of which is also belatedly but grudgingly acknowledged by the current reform-minded Chinese communist leadership. As long as traditional complex characters prevail in Taiwan and elsewhere and are essential to classical Chinese studies, further helped by the entrenched American position on Wade-Giles romanisation, the Mathews* Chinese-English Dictionary, first published in 1931 and subsequently gone into several revisions, has stood the test of time.

(CJK Research Library, 16 May 1999)