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Curious Lexicographic Relic of the Cultural Revolution1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2013

DAVID PRAGER BRANNER  and
YUAN-YUAN MENG
DAVID PRAGER BRANNER
Affiliation:
City College of New York
YUAN-YUAN MENG
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

This paper considers the fact that many verbal Chinese idioms are defined in recent Chinese-English dictionaries with misleading parts of speech — they are generally described only as being nouns. This situation originates in the 1978 Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn 汉英词典 of Wú Jǐngróng 吴景荣, whose definitions have exerted overwhelming influence on the field since then. We document Wú's principal sources and the viewpoints that motivated him, including the heavy political pressure to which his lexicographic team were subjected in the late Cultural Revolution. In addition, we consider Wú's anomalous misreading of the purpose of the influential Giles and Mathews dictionaries, which had been to document the many senses of each character with multi-character words, rather than to document multi-character words per se.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 551 - 582
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2013 

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Footnotes

1

This paper was presented as “ ‘Lisping’ in Mandarin” at the 58th annual meeting of the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society, Portland, Oregon, 25 October, 2008; it also draws on another paper, “Hàn-Yīng cídiǎnxué zhōng de ‘yǔfǎ yújiā’ 汉英词典学中的‘语法瑜伽’ [‘Syntactic Yoga’ in Chinese-English Lexicography]”, presented as a plenary speech at the 2009年《康熙字典》暨词典学国际学术研讨会 [International Seminar on Kangxi Dictionary and Lexicology, 2009], Huángchéng Xiàngfǔ, Yángchéng County, Shānxī 山西省阳城县皇城相府, on 16 July, 2009. All Chinese citations in this essay are presented as originally published, resulting in a mixture of “traditional” and “simplified” graphs. All English definitions from published dictionaries are presented using their original spelling and punctuation.

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