From Mandarin to Cantonese Lexicography: A genealogical study of Robert Morrison’s Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828)
RuiLi
Guangdong University of Finance & Economics | Aarhus University
Abstract
The Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect, compiled by Robert Morrison (1782–1834) and published in
1828 in Macao, was the first bilingual dictionary of Cantonese in a Western language. This article traces the genealogy of the
Vocabulary by examining Morrison’s sources. It is shown how Morrison availed himself of the resources of
Mandarin dictionaries and of the lexicographical work on Cantonese undertaken in the 1820s.
Mandarin Chinese, as seen in dictionaries and other written materials, was traditionally recorded mostly in the form of
classical Chinese. Spoken Mandarin was seldom recorded in official documents. However, the 16th century saw a significant change with
the arrival of western missionaries in China. They broke away from traditional lexicographical practices by compiling bilingual
dictionaries, both published and unpublished, recording spoken Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese with glosses in Western languages.
Instead of using fǎnqiè反切
, a traditional method in Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic
character by using two other characters, the first having the same consonant and the second having the same vowel and tone, Catholic
missionaries, particularly Jesuits, focused mainly on Guānhuà官話, also called Mandarin, the language of the officials, which was an official “language common to
the whole Empire”, rather than on “the various dialects of the different provinces” (Ricci 1953
[1615]: 28). The Protestants, especially after the Opium War, placed great emphasis on the description of major southern
dialects in their dictionary-making work, distinguishing themselves from the Catholic tradition.
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