A Chinese–English Dictionary (1892), compiled by the British consular officer and sinologist Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935), is the first Chinese–English encyclopedic dictionary. Giles started compilation after being rebuked for criticizing mistranslations in Samuel Wells Williams' (1874) A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language. The 1,461-page first edition contains 13,848 Chinese character head entries alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade–Giles system, which Giles created as a modification of Thomas Wade's (1867) system. Giles' dictionary furthermore gives pronunciations from nine regional varieties of Chinese, and three Sino-Xenic languages Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Giles revised his dictionary into the 1,813-page second edition (1912) with the addition of 67 entries and numerous usage examples.
History
Herbert Giles served as a British consular officer in late Qing dynasty China until from 1867 to 1892. After his return to England, he was appointed the second professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge, in succession to Thomas Francis Wade. They are renowned for developing what was later called the Wade–Giles romanization system of Chinese, which Giles' A Chinese–English Dictionary firmly established as the standard in the Western world until the 1958 official international pinyin system.
In 1867, Giles passed the competitive Foreign Office examination for a Student Interpretership in China, and began studying the Chinese language at Peking. He later criticized his first Chinese book, a Part II reprint of Robert Morrison's (1815–1823) A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts, because it failed to mark aspiration, "much as if an English–Chinese dictionary, for the use of the Chinese, were published without the letter h, showing no difference between the conjunction and and the [h]and of the body".
Herbert A. Giles wrote some 60 publications on Chinese culture and language (see Wikisource list), which may be divided into four broad categories: reference works, language textbooks, translations, and miscellaneous writings. His pioneering reference books established new standards of accuracy. Of all his publications, Giles was most proud of (1892, 1912) A Chinese–English Dictionary, and (1898) A Chinese Biographical Dictionary. Giles' textbooks for Chinese language learners include (1873) A Dictionary of Colloquial Idioms in the Mandarin Dialect and two Chinese phrasebooks transliterated phonetically according to the English alphabet, "so that anyone could pick up the book and read off a simple sentence with a good chance of being understood": the (1872) Chinese without a Teacher and (1877) Handbook of the Swatow Dialect: With a Vocabulary for Teochew dialect. His wide-ranging translations cover many genres of Chinese literature. Probably the best known are (1880, 1916) Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, (1884, 1922) Gems of Chinese Literature, and (1889, 1926) Chuang Tzŭ, Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer. Giles' other writings include some of the first general histories of China, the (1901) A History of Chinese Literature, (1906) Religions of Ancient China, and (1911) The Civilization of China.
Herbert Giles says he decided to compile A Chinese–English Dictionary after his review of Williams' A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language "brought down on my head many objurgations from the author's friends". As Giles explains in his previously unpublished (c. 1918–1925) typescript memoirs, [The] review was of Dr Williams' Syllabic Dictionary (Evening Gazette, 16 Sept., 1874), for which I was freely bespattered with abuse from all American quarters. I showed up a multiplicity of absurd blunders and equally egregious omissions; and I wound up with these prophetic words: "We do not hesitate to pronounce Dr Williams the lexicographer, not for the future, but of the past." I at once began upon a dictionary of my own. Provoked by the American missionary Williams, Giles devoted himself to publishing a new dictionary that "was meant to bring the glory of having compiled the best Chinese–English dictionary back from America to England".
Five years later, Giles published a 40-page brochure (1879) On some Translations and Mistranslations in Dr. Williams' Syllabic Dictionary that was reported extensively among English-language newspapers published in China. "I was badly mauled" in the Daily Press (Hong Kong), "received unstinted praise" in the North China Daily News, and was supported in the Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, which said "the Dictionary is in fault in most of the instances given." Giles sent a copy of his brochure to Williams, but received no reply. Since Williams reprinted his dictionary from stereotype plates, he was unable to make corrections, and added, in 1883, an Errata and Corrections on a fly-sheet at the end—without acknowledgement of Giles' corrections.
Herbert Giles continued working on his Chinese–English dictionary for 15 years until 1889 when the Foreign Office granted his request to be stationed as Consul at Ningpo, where the workload was light and he could prepare the manuscript for press. The Shanghai publishers Kelly & Walsh printed the dictionary in 4 fascicules from 1891 to 1892.
The first edition A Chinese–English Dictionary (1892), which Bernard Quaritch also published in London, had 2 royal quarto (250 by 320 mm.) volumes comprising a 46-page front matter (9-page Preface and 32-page Philological Essay) and the 1415-page dictionary, printed in triple columns, beginning with 60 pages of tables. The price was $35.
For the subsequent two decades, Giles diligently worked "to correct mistakes, cut out duplicates and unnecessary matter, prepare revised Tables, and add a very large number of new phrases, taken from my reading in modern as well as in ancient literature". In 1903 Lord Lansdowne, then Foreign Secretary, asked Sir Ernest Satow, then Minister in Peking, by letter whether a new edition should be purchased for the British Peking legation and consulates, and whether publication should be funded from the Civil List Fund. After consulting with Giles, Satow supported the new publication in a letter dated May 29, 1903, stating "I understand from the author that the new edition is not a mere reproduction of the first. Mistakes have been corrected, further meanings have been added to many characters, frequent cross-references have been introduced, and no fewer than ten thousand new phrases have been distributed over the entries as they now stand, chiefly drawn from sources in which the Dictionary has been found to be deficient".Satow Papers, PRO 30/33 7/2.
The revised and enlarged second edition (1912) was likewise published by Kelly & Walsh and Bernard Quaritch in 7 fascicules printed from 1909 to 1912. It had 2 royal quarto volumes, with Part I comprising a 17-page preface (with extracts from the first edition) and 84 pages of tables; and Part II comprising the dictionary itself, printed in triple columns. Compared with the first edition of 1,461 total pages, the 1,813-page second edition is 398 pages longer. Giles produced the first edition entirely at his own risk, and it cost £2300, towards which the Foreign Office gave £300. The second edition cost £4800, towards which they gave £250.
Giles' Chinese–English dictionary remained in "constant use" for generations. A compact edition was reprinted by Paragon Books (Chicago) in 1964, Ch'eng Wen (Taipei) in 1978, and is still available online.Yang 1985: 288.
Giles learned that Edmund Backhouse, one of his first Chinese language students at Cambridge, had been trying for years to compile a Chinese–English dictionary. In 1925, he used it to metaphorically describe Chinese bilingual lexicography in terms of international sports competition. [Backhouse's dictionary] is of course intended to supersede my own work. Well, dictionaries are like dogs, and have their day; and I should be the last person to whine over the appearance of the dictionary of the future, which it is to be hoped will come in good time, and will help to an easier acquisition of "the glorious language." Morrison and Medhurst, both Englishmen, between them held the blue ribbon of Chinese lexicography from 1816 to 1874; then it passed to Wells Williams, who held it for America until 1892, when I think I may claim to have recaptured it for my own country, and to have held it now for thirty-three years.
In the history of bilingual Chinese lexicography, Giles' Dictionary is the fourth major Chinese–English dictionary after Robert Morrison's (1815–1823) A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, Walter Henry Medhurst's (1842) Chinese and English Dictionary, and Samuel Wells Williams' (1874) A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language. Giles' dictionary was superseded by Robert Henry Mathews' (1931) A Chinese–English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission. In contrast to Morrison, Medhurst, Williams, and Mathews, who were all Christian missionaries in China, Giles was an agnostic anti-clericalist.
The historian Huiling Yang found that although Giles strongly criticized Williams' dictionary, it turns out that Giles' own dictionary is more closely linked to Williams' than to Morrison's, which Giles praised highly. Medhurst's, Williams', and Giles' Chinese–English dictionaries are all members of a tradition that originated with Morrison's work. Each of their dictionaries made contributions and improvements to the art of Chinese–English dictionary compilation.
Giles' preface to the second edition gives a "Comparative Table of Phrases under Various Characters, Taken as Specimens, to illustrate the Progress of Chinese–English Lexicography", for example: Morrison, 1819 Medhurst, 1843 Williams, 1874 Giles, 1892 Giles, 1912 to speak 11 15 28 96 129 mountains 17 6 19 89 109 to be born 21 27 42 135 162 to strike 23 21 24 167 172 stones 20 19 23 76 89 as if 8 6 18 78 112
Content
Herbert Giles worked for 18 years to compile and publish the 1892 first edition A Chinese–English Dictionary, which contains 10,859 character head entries plus 2,989 variant characters for a total of 13,848 entries. He decided to number every head entry—an improvement lacking in the earlier dictionaries of Morrison, Medhurst, and Williams—in order to facilitate internal cross-referencing and make it easier for users to find characters. Giles subsequently worked for 20 years revising and adding "a vast number of compounds and phrases" to the 1912 second edition, which contains 10,926 head entries (67 more) plus 2,922 variants, also totaling 13,848.
Despite the addition of new head entries to the second edition, Giles kept the original 13,848 numerical arrangement owing to an unintended consequence. People in China were using the dictionary numbers as a Chinese telegraph code, that is, a character encoding index for telegraphs written in Chinese characters—analogous with modern Chinese input methods for computers. Another example of using Giles' 13,848 numbers to index characters is Vernon Nash's (1936) Trindex: an Index to Three Dictionaries or San zidian yinde 三字典引得, for A Chinese–English Dictionary, (1711) Peiwen Yunfu rime dictionary, and (1716) Kangxi Dictionary.
The dictionary is alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade–Giles system, a, ai, an, ang, etc. Within each syllabic pronunciation section, characters sharing the same phonetic element and different graphic radicals are arranged together, for instance, the phonetic ai4 (number 32) "mugwort; artemisia" is followed by ai4 (33, with the mouth radical) "an interjection of surprise", ai4 (34, food radical) "food which has been spoilt", and ai4 (35, bird radical) "the hen of the tailor-bird".