A remarkable compilation shift: A genealogical study of Medhurst’s Chinese and English Dictionary (1842–1843)

Rui Li and Annette Skovsted Hansen
Aarhus University
Summary

During his work on his Chinese and English Dictionary (1842–1843) Walter Henry Medhurst (1796–1857) dramatically changed his compilation strategy by shifting from depending almost exclusively on Robert Morrison’s (1782–1834) Chinese-English dictionary, Zidian 字典 (1815–1823) to depending on multiple sources including Kangxi zidian 康熙字典 (1716), Morrison’s Wuche yunfu 五車韻府 (1819–1820), and Medhurst’s own A Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language (1832). By applying Lexicographic Archaeology to four linguistic case studies, this article discusses the reasons for this unusual lexicographical phenomenon. The authors argue that changes in information in Morrison’s Zidian after the 41st radical influenced Medhurst’s choices.

Publication history

Published online: 1 February 2019

Corrected: 3 May 2022

In May 2022 the first author requested "Sun Yat-Sen University" to be removed from his affiliation, as earlier permission to use this affiliation as a project member at that university was no longer acknowledged.
Table of contents

Nearly 200 years ago, Robert Morrison (1782–1834) published the world’s first Chinese-English/English-Chinese bilingual dictionary, and English Dictionary Chinese in Three Parts (1815–1823) in Macao. It contains three relatively independent parts. The first part is Zidian 字典 [The Dictionary] arranged according to the radicals of Chinese characters and published in three volumes in 1815, 1822, and 1823, respectively. The second part is Wuche yunfu 五車韻府 [Erudition Syllabic Dictionary] arranged alphabetically and published in two volumes in 1819 and 1820. In addition, the third part is an English-Chinese dictionary without a specific Chinese title (cf. Yang 2014: 303). Even though Zidian and Wuche yunfu are two parts of one large dictionary, they are independent of each other and have some of the same entries and we, therefore, will consider them as two dictionaries here for the purpose of analysis.

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