Concise Dictionary of Classical Chinese

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear all,

In the preface to Edwin G. Pulleybank's "Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar", Pulleybank wrote:

The grant was provided for a Concise Dictionary of Classical Chinese, of which the Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar was to serve as an introduction. In the end it has seemed better to publish the Outline separately. The Dictionary exists in the form of a preliminary draft on computer but will still require much work before it is in publishable form.

XXXXXXX

That was written in 1995 or 14 years ago. Does anyone know if they are still working on the dictionary and if so when it will be published?

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

[diannao]

Hi Kobo-Daishhi,

I was wondering about this too since any kind of Classical Chinese dictionary in a Western language is unavailable. Couvreur's Dictionnaire classique de la langue chinoise is only available in the reading room of a select few universities and can hardly be purchased anywhere. Since it was published in 1904 and Couvreur died in 1919, the copyright has expired long ago, but it can't be found on Google Books or anywhere else online.

I did however come accross "Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin" by Pulleyblank. See amazon. But the years don't match: it was published in 1991.

Does anyone know of any Classical Chinese dictionary in English (or an other European language) that IS available?

Thanks in advance.

Take care,

diannao

[Daan]

The dictionary Pulleyblank mentions was never published. His Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin is not so much a dictionary as a list of reconstructed readings. John Cikoski's Notes for a Lexicon of Classical Chinese might fit the bill, but as far as I'm aware has not been finished yet. In his introduction, he writes:

The first volume of the lexical notes is a very rough draft of a dictionary; it contains:

• 24,000 words (including proper names) with English glosses and Chinese graphs

• Archaic Chinese readings for those words, reconstructed according to the system in Grammata

Serica Recensab (briefly GSR) and listed alphabetically by articulation-class of initial

• for many words, my modified Archaic reading, word-class label,c Kuang Yün 廣韻 rime class

(for 廣韻, see below, p. xviii), reference to comparands (Matisoff’s term for words similar

enough in sound and meaning to suggest etymological relationship), or illustrative citations

• lists of abbreviations, texts cited, extensions to GSR and examples of comparands of mimetics

You can download the current draft at http://gkarin.com/cikoski/. I've never used it much myself, preferring to use Classical Chinese - Mandarin dictionaries, so let me know how you get on.

By the way, I think 光啟文化 (http://kcg.org.tw) may be able to sell you a reprint of Couvreur's Dictionnaire classique de la langue chinoise. I seem to recall they had them last year, for about 1500 TWD (roughly US$ 50). You may have to ask for the Chinese title, 中國古文大辭典(法文注釋)(精). Again, let me know how you get on!

[diannao]

Thanks for pointing me to Cikoski's lexicon! It looks quite good at first glance.

I can't speak Mandarin. It's a bit strange that most Classical Chinese dictionaries are in Mandarin only, it's like Latin dictionaries only being available in Italian Are there really so few people interested in Classical Chinese in the West that there isn't a market for a dictionary?

Thanks for the Courveur suggestion, I'll check it out, but at the first sight of the site, it looks like being able to speak Mandarin would come in handy

[Daan]

I'm afraid that there isn't really enough demand (yet) for a Classical Chinese - English dictionary to make it worthwhile to put one together. It is, after all, a huge amount of work, and if you're only going to sell 500 copies, then that may not quite be enough. And as most people in the West who want to learn CC know Mandarin as well, it's not urgently necessary to publish one, I guess. I for one would wholeheartedly welcome a CC - English dictionary, but it looks like we may have to wait a few more years.

Regarding that reprint, I'm sorry, I didn't realise the site was only available in Mandarin. Here's a link that will take you straight through to the relevant page, and their e-mail address is kcg@kcg.org.tw. I'm pretty sure they'll be able to read English, so you could e-mail them and ask whether they'd be able to ship this book internationally and what the postage would be. If it turns out they don't understand English, I'll gladly help you translate your message

[diannao]

Daan, thanks for your help. I'm happy to hear that Couvreur's book might still be available. I'll give it a try.

[Renacido]

I must say I'm surprised at Cikoski's Lexical Notes, but yes, it seems the assumption here is that all students of Classical Chinese are good enough at Modern Written Chinese to use dictionaries such as the 漢語大詞典. You may also want to look at one of Cikoski's sources, Karlgren's Grammata Serica Recensa (<clicky!), which is also a Classical Chinese-English dictionary even if pretty old (published in 1957) in comparison to the ongoing work by Cikoski.

[SanderP]

You also may want to check out 'ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese' by Axel Schuessler (Amazon). Old Chinese, according to Axel Schuessler, means 1250 BC to the Han period.

It may not be exactly what you are looking for, but at least it gives English translations. The glosses are indexed on modern Mandarin pronunciation (in pinyin).

On this subject, there is an interesting quote from Axel in the Preface:

"Pulleyblank (1992: 20) remarked that the compilation of a 'proper etymological dictionary' of Chinese still lies in the future. In this sense, the future has not yet arrived and, for that matter, may never arrive, because many morphological mechanisms and morphemes are not understood."

And this was written in 2007.

This is a part of the product discription:

Designed for use by nonspecialists and specialists alike, the dictionary is highly accessible, being arranged in alphabetical order and possessed of numerous innovative lexicographical features. Each entry offers one or more possible etymologies as well as reconstructed pronunciations and other relevant data. Words that are morphologically related are grouped together into "word families" that attempt to make explicit the derivational or other etymological processes that relate them. The dictionary is preceded by a substantive and significant introduction that outlines the author’s views on the linguistic position of Chinese within Asia and details the phonological and morphological properties, to the degree they are known, of the earliest stages of the Chinese language and its ancestor. This introduction, because it both summaries and synthesizes earlier work and makes several original contributions, functions as a useful reference work all on its own.

[Kobo-Daishi]

It's come to my attention that Edwin G. Pulleybank passed away last week in Vancouver.

A truly sad loss for the Chinese language community.

Does anyone know if he was still working on his classical dictionary at the time of his passing? Or if someone has taken on the mantle to complete the task?

Kobo.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Daan wrote:

You can download the current draft at http://gkarin.com/cikoski/. I've never used it much myself, preferring to use Classical Chinese - Mandarin dictionaries, so let me know how you get on.

I downloaded a copy when you first posted the links, but, never used it much.

It was too difficult to search for words. So with scanned copies of all the literary Chinese dictionaries available, there was no point.

The Romanization system was too difficult for me to use.

I had lost the material when I had a disk failure and recently went and downloaded it again. It appears they've got a newer file uploaded as the file date is later than the thread post date.

Kobo.

[Renacido]

It was too difficult to search for words. So with scanned copies of all the literary Chinese dictionaries available' date=' there was no point.[/quote']Yes. That's because Cikoski is an admirer of a certain Swedish linguist, Bernhard Karlgren, who made a Classical Chinese-English dictionary back in the 1950s with a similar difficulty to find words in... His dictionary is still said to be one of the best available in English, if not the best, in spite of its issues (notably its age).

The Romanization system was too difficult for me to use.

That's because it's not a Mandarin romanization, but one reconstruction of pronunciations at... some point in time before 200 BC... following similar principles to those used by Karlgren I guess. Even though Cikoski is highly critical of the typical assumption by linguists that Chinese went through two bottlenecks where everybody spoke kind of with the same pronunciation, namely "Old Chinese" and "Middle Chinese", he nonetheless uses "Old Chinese" pronunciations in his dictionary to arrange the words. I wish his dictionary could be arranged according to the traditonal radical and strokes order, maybe even Mandarin/Cantonese pronunciation using some electronic program.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Renacido wrote:

Kobo wrote:

It was too difficult to search for words. So with scanned copies of all the literary Chinese dictionaries available, there was no point.

Yes. That's because Cikoski is an admirer of a certain Swedish linguist, Bernhard Karlgren, who made a Classical Chinese-English dictionary back in the 1950s with a similar difficulty to find words in... His dictionary is still said to be one of the best available in English, if not the best, in spite of its issues (notably its age).

Kobo wrote:

The Romanization system was too difficult for me to use.

That's because it's not a Mandarin romanization, but one reconstruction of pronunciations at... some point in time before 200 BC... following similar principles to those used by Karlgren I guess. Even though Cikoski is highly critical of the typical assumption by linguists that Chinese went through two bottlenecks where everybody spoke kind of with the same pronunciation, namely "Old Chinese" and "Middle Chinese", he nonetheless uses "Old Chinese" pronunciations in his dictionary to arrange the words. I wish his dictionary could be arranged according to the traditonal radical and strokes order, maybe even Mandarin/Cantonese pronunciation using some electronic program.

SanderP wrote:

You also may want to check out 'ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese' by Axel Schuessler (Amazon). Old Chinese, according to Axel Schuessler, means 1250 BC to the Han period.

Why do we in the English-speaking world get crap based around Karlgren's Grammata Serica Recensa?

By the way, I have a copy of Karlgren's Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese. I don't use it either.

Is it really too hard to come up with a literary Chinese-English dictionary?

I remember reading Wilkinson's Chinese History: A Manual where he talked about two projects to create literary Chinese-English dictionaries, the Chinese-English Dictionary, Preliminary Print and the Zhongshan Da Cidian.

The first one, after coming up with 30 meanings for the character 子 and 68 pages of compounds that started with the character 子, they gave up.

For the second one, after 58 definitions for 一 and 5,474 words and phrases beginning with 一, they also gave up.

What kind of BS is this?

No Chinese only literary Chinese has that many definitions for either 子 or 一. Or that many words and phrases.

Why doesn't Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale or some other university just get the rights to a Chinese literary dictionary and translate that. Or is that too hard.

Kobo.