Medhurst's Chinese and English Dictionary
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The ''Chinese and English Dictionary: Containing All the Words in the Chinese Imperial Dictionary, Arranged According to the Radicals'' (1842), compiled by the English Congregationalist missionary
Walter Henry Medhurst Walter Henry Medhurst (29 April 179624 January 1857), was an English Congregationalist missionary to China, born in London and educated at St Paul's School. He was one of the early translators of the Bible into Chinese-language editions. Earl ...
(1796-1857), is the second major Chinese-English dictionary after Robert Morrison's pioneering (1815-1823) ''
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language ''A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts'' or ''Morrison's Chinese dictionary'' (1815-1823), compiled by the Anglo-Scottish missionary Robert Morrison was the first Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary. Part I is Chinese-Engli ...
''. Medhurst's intention was to publish an abridged and cheaper dictionary that still contained all the 47,035 head
characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
from the (1716) ''
Kangxi Dictionary The ''Kangxi Dictionary'' ( (Compendium of standard characters from the Kangxi period), published in 1716, was the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th. The Kangxi Emperor of the Qing ...
'', which Morrison's huge dictionary included. Medhurst reversed and revised into his Chinese-English dictionary in compiling the (1847-1848) ''English and Chinese Dictionary in Two Volumes''.


History

Walter Henry Medhurst Walter Henry Medhurst (29 April 179624 January 1857), was an English Congregationalist missionary to China, born in London and educated at St Paul's School. He was one of the early translators of the Bible into Chinese-language editions. Earl ...
and Robert Morrison were
London Missionary Society The London Missionary Society was an interdenominational evangelical missionary society formed in England in 1795 at the instigation of Welsh Congregationalist minister Edward Williams. It was largely Reformed in outlook, with Congregational m ...
(LMS) colleagues and friends. Both were professional printers, missionaries in China, and amateur lexicographers. In an 1817 letter, Morrison told the LMS directors that Medhurst had sent a promising specimen of small metal types, intended for magazines and tracts, and said the "qualifications and attention of Mr. M. give us great satisfaction". When Morrison was returning to China in 1826, he met with Medhurst in
Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
and they discussed their common work. Medhurst began compiling his dictionary in 1838, and wrote the LMS missionary printer William Ellis in Tahiti that he planned for his English-Chinese dictionary to include about 15,000 entry words and be "fit for every purpose of religion and science". As Medhurst explained in an 1841 letter to the LMS directors, his motivation to produce a Chinese and English dictionary came from Morrison's expensive one, which the missionary school's students could not afford. He said his "compendious and cheap" dictionary would contain "every character in Morrison's with all of the useful phrases, in one volume at the moderate cost of a few dollars". Medhurst's preface says his purpose was to compile a "commodious, uniform, and comprehensive Dictionary" for English students of the Chinese language, comprising the 47,035 head
characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
in the (1716) ''
Kangxi Dictionary The ''Kangxi Dictionary'' ( (Compendium of standard characters from the Kangxi period), published in 1716, was the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th. The Kangxi Emperor of the Qing ...
'' ("Imperial Dictionary of Kang-he"), with the exception of those that supposedly have "either no sound or no meaning attached to them". Medhurst initially intended to compile a complete English-Chinese dictionary, but he found that the available materials were insufficient, and it was necessary for him to first create a Chinese-English dictionary, after which the work would be "comparatively easy to reverse the whole", and then add further English terms. Medhurst acknowledges taking phrases from Morrison's Chinese-English Dictionary and elsewhere, and adopting Morrison's widely used
orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...
, with the addition of
aspirated consonant In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with t ...
s and
pitch accent A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
s or tones, "as far as they were ascertainable".


Chinese-English content

Medhurst printed, at his own expense, his dictionary in 1842, at Parapattan
Batavia, Dutch East Indies Batavia was the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The area corresponds to present-day Jakarta, Indonesia. Batavia can refer to the city proper or its suburbs and hinterland, the Ommelanden, which included the much-larger area of the Residen ...
. The 648-page Volume I was completed by October 1842, and the 838-page Volume II was finished in May 1843, both were published in 600 copies. Its inexpensive printing enabled Medhurst to sell this bulky dictionary at only 10
Spanish dollars The Spanish dollar, also known as the piece of eight ( es, Real de a ocho, , , or ), is a silver coin of approximately diameter worth eight Spanish reales. It was minted in the Spanish Empire following a monetary reform in 1497 with content ...
. As the title says, Medhurst collated his bilingual dictionary by radical-and-stroke sorting according to the 214 Kangxi radicals—the same collation method used in Morrison's (1815-1823) Part I Chinese-English dictionary. Volume I comprises 648 pages of dictionary entries, from
Radical 1 Radical 1 or radical one () meaning "one" is one of the 6 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals in total) composed of 1 stroke. In the ''Kangxi Dictionary'', there are 42 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical. is also the 1st index ...
一 "one" to Radical 111 矢 "arrow", and 50 pages of supplementary materials. The front matter includes an 11-page preface, 3-page list of the radicals, and the 5-page "Directions for discovering under what Radical any given character may be found"; the postface is a 29-page "List of Obsolete, Contracted, and Vulgar Characters, Not occurring in the foregoing Dictionary Volume I". Volume II comprises 838 pages of dictionary entries, from
Radical 112 Radical 112 or radical stone () meaning "stone In geology, rock (or stone) is any naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals or mineraloid matter. It is categorized by the minerals included, its Chemical compound, chemical comp ...
石 "stone" to Radical 214 龠 "flute", and a 28-page postface list of uncommon characters not in the volume. The preface briefly explains to dictionary users, particularly English-speaking students of the Chinese language, Medhurst's
orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...
for
Standard Chinese phonology This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin). Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies wide ...
. The dictionary includes 20
initials In a written or published work, an initial capital, also referred to as a drop capital or simply an initial cap, initial, initcapital, initcap or init or a drop cap or drop, is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that ...
, and Medhurst adopted Morrison's method of using apostrophes to represent the unaspirated-aspirated stop consonant pairs (listen to examples
here Here is an adverb that means "in, on, or at this place". It may also refer to: Software * Here Technologies, a mapping company * Here WeGo (formerly Here Maps), a mobile app and map website by Here Technologies, Here Television * Here TV (form ...
). For instance, this description of the
denti-alveolar consonant In linguistics, a denti-alveolar consonant or dento-alveolar consonant is a consonant that is articulated with a flat tongue against the alveolar ridge and the upper teeth, such as and in languages such as French, Italian and Spanish. That is, ...
s of unaspirated IPA // and aspirated // ( Wade-Giles ''t'' and ''t;
pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally writte ...
''d'' and ''t''): "''T'', as in ''top''; and ''t'h'' like the former, only with an aspirate between the ''t'', and following vowel; not as the ''th'' in ''though'', or in ''thing'', but at the same letters in the words ''at home'', supposing the initial ''a'' to be left out". The 55
finals Final, Finals or The Final may refer to: *Final (competition), the last or championship round of a sporting competition, match, game, or other contest which decides a winner for an event ** Another term for playoffs, describing a sequence of cont ...
are also explained, for example, the rhotic coda or r-colored vowel //, which is difficult for many non-native speakers. "''Urh'', is a peculiar sound, something between the ''r'' and ''I'', produced by a vibration of the lower part of the tongue against the inward region of the palate, near the entrance of the throat; it is something similar to the smooth sound of the ''r'', heard in end of English words, as in ''liar''." Medhurst's dictionary annotates tones in terms of the classical
four tones This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin). Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies wid ...
of
Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
pronunciation used in rime dictionaries, instead of the five tones of the 19th-century Southern
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
spoken by Morrison (1 "mid-level", 2 "high rising", 3 "falling", 4 "short", and 5 "rising"). Medhurst indicated ''píng'' 平 "level" tone as unmarked (a), ''shǎng'' 上 "rising" tone with
grave A grave is a location where a dead body (typically that of a human, although sometimes that of an animal) is buried or interred after a funeral. Graves are usually located in special areas set aside for the purpose of burial, such as grav ...
accent (à), ''qù'' 去 "departing" tone with acute accent (á), ''rù'' 入"entering" tone with short accent (ӑ), and ''xià píng'' 下平 "lower even" tone with
circumflex accent The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
(â). The entering tone had basically ceased to exist by the 1840s in Beijing, but still remained present in Nanjing. Medhurst adopted Morrison's dictionary page layout with the page number centered between the character radical number and stroke number:
Radical 162 Radical 162 or radical walk () meaning "walk" is one of the 20 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals in total) composed of 7 strokes. When used as a component, this radical character transforms into ⻍, ⻌, or ⻎ (See #Variant forms). In the ''Kangxi ...
辵 or 辶 "walk" and the 9 additional strokes in ''shǒu'' 首 "head" (animated 12- stroke order for 道 is shown
here Here is an adverb that means "in, on, or at this place". It may also refer to: Software * Here Technologies, a mapping company * Here WeGo (formerly Here Maps), a mobile app and map website by Here Technologies, Here Television * Here TV (form ...
).


English-Chinese content

The Mission Press in Shanghai published Medhurst's ''English and Chinese dictionary in two volumes'' in 1847 and 1848, respectively. Publishing 600 copies of this 1,436-page dictionary was the largest work of the mission in its hand-press period. Owing to Medhurst's disappointment with the low quality results from combining typography and lithography to print Chinese characters for the ''Chinese and English Dictionary'', he decided to use
letterpress printing Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing. Using a printing press, the process allows many copies to be produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. A worker com ...
for the ''English and Chinese Dictionary'', which required the cutting of small type. The LMS had previously used small type to print Christian translations and tracts that were smuggled into China, where they were forbidden. In Shanghai, Medhurst employed Chinese workers to punchcut moveable-type Chinese characters on blank shanks, "about 15,000 sorts, and nearly 100,000 individual types" that were required for the dictionary. For the bilingual sources of his English-Chinese dictionary, Medhurst says he extracted "all that he thought serviceable from Morrison" and an anonymous Latin-Chinese manuscript dictionary—presumably the Italian Franciscan Basilio Brollo's (1698) ''Dictionarium Sino-Latinum''—"while he flatters himself that he has gone far beyond either of his predecessors, in the amount of foreign words adduced, and of expressions brought together to elucidate them.".
Volume I (1847)
has a 6-page preface, 2-page summary of orthographic conventions, and the 766-page dictionary proper. The entries begin with "A, the letter a; the broad and open sound of this letter is expressed by 亞 a 'yà'' or 阿 a 'ā''" and end with "KORAN, the Mahomedans, call the Koran 天經 ''t'hëen king'' 'tiānjīng''"
Volume II (1848)
of Medhurst's English-Chinese dictionary comprises 669 pages. The entries go from "LABEL, 帖 ''t'ëĕ'' 'tiè'' the label of a book, 檢 ''këen'' 'jiǎn''" To "ZONE, 帶 taé 'dài'' 束腰之帶 shǔ yaou che taé 'shùyāo zhī dài'' 腰帶 yaou taé 'yāodài'' 地球道 té k'hêu taóu 'dìqiúdào''" The sample page (to the right) contains Medhurst's dictionary entry for WAY.
Way. 道 Taóu, 路 loó, 庚 käng, 康 k'hang, 彭 p'hang, 疏 sоо, 略路 lëǒ loó, 繇道 yaòu taóu, 道術途 taóu shǔh t'hoô, 街 keae, 街路 keae loó, 迪 teĭh, 逕 king, 途 t'hoô, 坻閣 te kǒ, 道路 taóu loó; in the way, 途間 t'hoô këen, 路中 loó chung, 街上 keae sháng; do not go in the way of death, 死路莫行 szè loó mǒ hing; leave the right way, 離開正路 lê k'hae chíng loó; public way, 大路 tá loó, 官路 kwan loó; a great way off, 離遠 lê yuèn; the way of Providence, 天步 t'ёеп poó; way to effect an object, 方法 fang fǎ; manner, 般 pwan, 術 shǔh; method, 樣法 yang fǎ, 計策 ké tsĭh, 法子 fǎ tszè; way-marks, 旌節 tsing tsëĕ; a wayfaring man, 羇旅 ke leù, 路人 loó jin.
The first part of the WAY headword gives 16 translation equivalents of Chinese words meaning "way". This illustrates how one single English headword can have ten or more Chinese translation equivalents, which Medhurst ascribes to either "the richness of the Chinese language, in certain particulars", or to "the inability of the compiler (from want of time and skill) to discover the slight shades of meaning that exist among them". Most of these equivalents are common terms, such as 道 ''taóu'' (''dào'' "way; road; path), 路 ''loó'' (''lù'' "road; path; way"), and 途 ''t'hoô'' (''tú'' "road; route; way"), but some are obscure
classical Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...
terms, such as ''dǐgé'' 坻閣, which the ''Kangxi zidian'' ( s.v., 閣) notes was the name of a road mentioned in commentaries to the '' Rites of Zhou'' (野廬氏). The second part of the WAY headword gives translations of 11 usage examples, for instance, "public way, 大路 ''tá loó'' , 官路 ''kwan loó''" (''dàlù'' "big street; main road; highway" and ''guānlù'' "government-financed road; public road", respectively).


Reception

Scholars have expressed diverse opinions of Walter Henry Medhurst's Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries. The first published evaluation of the (1842-1843) ''Chinese and English Dictionary'' was an anonymous 1843 review in ''
The Chinese Repository ''The Chinese Repository'' was a periodical published in Canton between May 1832 and 1851 to inform Protestant missionaries working in Asia about the history and culture of China, of current events, and documents. The world's first major journal of ...
'', which was a Protestant missionary periodical published in Canton. On the one hand, the reviewer praises the dictionary's portability and price, "two
octavo Octavo, a Latin word meaning "in eighth" or "for the eighth time", (abbreviated 8vo, 8º, or In-8) is a technical term describing the format of a book, which refers to the size of leaves produced from folding a full sheet of paper on which multip ...
volumes containing 1500 pages for ten dollars", but on the other, expresses regret that Medhurst "has said so little on the subject of ''tones''" other than "that he considers them of paramount importance". Based upon comparison of the entries under
Radical 46 Radical 46 or radical mountain () meaning "mountain" is one of the 31 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals total) composed of three strokes. It is found in the names of mountains generally in east Asia. In the ''Kangxi Dictionary'', there are 636 charac ...
山 "mountain" in Morrison's and Medhurst's Chinese-English dictionaries, the reviewer said, "If Mr. Medhurst does not improve upon himself, he improves vastly upon Dr. Morrison". The next major Chinese-English dictionary after Medhurst's was the American sinologist and missionary
Samuel Wells Williams Samuel Wells Williams (22 September 1812 – 16 February 1884) was a linguist, official, missionary and Sinologist from the United States in the early 19th century. Early life Williams was born in Utica, New York, son of William Williams (178 ...
's (1874) ''
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language ''A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai'' or the ''Hàn-Yīng yùnfǔ 漢英韻府'', compiled by the Amer ...
''. The preface says that although many similar Chinese-English dictionaries by Medhurst, Elijah Coleman Bridgman, and others were published in small numbers, they became "very scarce, while the number of students has increased tenfold", and learners of Chinese relied on reprints of Morrison's dictionary. Williams explicitly identified "Dr. Medhurst's translation of the K'anghi Tsz'tien" as a more important source for his own work than Morrison's dictionary. The preface to the British diplomat and sinologist
Herbert Giles Herbert Allen Giles (, 8 December 184513 February 1935) was a British diplomat and sinologist who was the professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge for 35 years. Giles was educated at Charterhouse School before becoming a British ...
's ''A Chinese-English Dictionary'' praised Morrison as "the great pioneer" of Chinese and English lexicography, but criticized his failure to mark aspiration. He said Medhurst "attempted aspirates, but omitted many and wrongly inserted others". Huiling Yang, a researcher at
Beijing Foreign Studies University Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU; ), is a public university in Beijing, China. BFSU boasts the oldest language programs in China offering the largest number of foreign language majors on different educational levels. Located in Haidia ...
, expresses surprise that the ''Chinese and English Dictionary'', which Medhurst claimed to be his translation based on ''Kangxi zidian'', "is in fact just an abbreviated and edited copy of Morrison’s, a plagiarism rather than an original compilation".


References

* * * * * * Footnotes


Further reading

* Medhurst, Walter Henry (1830)
An English and Japanese, and Japanese and English Vocabulary Compiled from Native Works
Lithography. * Medhurst, Walter Henry (1832)
A Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language: According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms: Containing about 12,000 Characters. Accompanied by a short historical and statistical account of Hok-këèn.
East India Press. * Norman, Jerry (1988), ''Chinese'', Cambridge University Press. {{Dictionaries of Chinese Chinese dictionaries