Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage, compiled by the linguist and author Lin Yutang, contains over 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 words and phrases, including many neologisms. Lin's dictionary made two lexicographical innovations, neither of which became widely used. Collation is based on his graphical "Instant Index System" that assigns numbers to Chinese characters based on 33 basic calligraphic stroke patterns. Romanization of Chinese is by Lin's "Simplified National Romanization System", which he developed as a prototype for the Gwoyeu Romatzyh or "National Romanization" system adopted by the Chinese government in 1928. Lin's bilingual dictionary continues to be used in the present day, particularly the free online version that the Chinese University of Hong Kong established in 1999.
History
Lin Yutang (1895–1976) was an influential Chinese scholar, linguist, educator, inventor, translator, and author of works in Chinese and English.
Lin's Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage was his second lexicographical effort. From 1932 to 1937, he compiled a 65-volume monolingual Chinese dictionary that was destroyed by Japanese troops during the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, except for 13 volumes that he had shipped earlier to New York.
Lin Yutang's "Instant Index System" for characters inspired his invention of the Ming Kwai Chinese typewriter in 1946. Users would input a character by pressing two keys based upon the 33 basic stroke formations, which Lin called "letters of the Chinese Alphabet".
Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage was the first major Chinese–English dictionary to be produced by a fully bilingual Chinese instead of by Western missionaries. In the history of Chinese lexicography, missionaries dominated the first century of Chinese‐English dictionaries, from Morrison's A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–1823) to Mathews's Chinese–English Dictionary (1931, 1943).
In the period between Mathews's and Lin's dictionaries, both the Chinese and English vocabularies underwent radical changes in terminology for fields such as popular culture, economics, politics, science, and technology. Lin's dictionary included many neologisms and loanwords not found in Mathews', for example (in pinyin), yuánzǐdàn 原子彈 " atomic bomb", hépíng gòngchǔ 和平共處 "peaceful coexistence", xị̌nǎo 洗腦 "brainwash", tàikōngrén 太空人 "astronaut", yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll", and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie".
The history of Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage began in late 1965, when Lin and Li Choh-ming, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, made plans for compiling a new Chinese–English dictionary as a "lasting contribution to knowledge". When the dictionary was published, Lin acknowledged that Li's "vision and enthusiastic support" made the compilation project possible. Lin started working on the dictionary in Taipei, and in the spring of 1967, he accepted the position of Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After completing the manuscript in the spring of 1971, Lin moved to Hong Kong, where his former student Francis Pan and a team of young Chinese University graduates assisted him with copyediting, research, and final preparations.
Li Choh-ming also contributed the dictionary's foreword (in Chinese and English) and title Chinese calligraphy seen on the cover. Li says that a good Chinese–English dictionary should provide an "idiomatic equivalence" of terms in the two languages, and derides previous dictionaries for rendering fèitiě 廢鐵 as "old iron" when it should "obviously" be "scrap iron". However, old iron is perfectly good British English usage.
This first edition was bilingually titled Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage or Dāngdài Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn (當代漢英詞典). Sponsored by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, this book was printed in Japan by Kenkyūsha, which is known for publishing high-quality dictionaries, and was distributed by McGraw-Hill in the United States. The original edition included three indexes: Lin's idiosyncratic "instant" index for looking up traditional Chinese characters, an alphabetical English index, and an index of about 2,000 simplified Chinese characters. However, many users unfamiliar with Lin's character indexing system found the dictionary difficult to use, which led to the following supplement.
In 1978, The Chinese University Press published the Supplementary index to Lin Yutang's Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage or Lín Yǔtáng dāngdài Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn zēng biān suǒyǐn (林語堂當代漢英詞典增編索引), which indexed by Wade-Giles romanization and by the 214 Kangxi radicals.
The 1987 revised edition The New Lin Yutang's Chinese–English Dictionary or Zuìxīn Lín Yǔtáng dāngdài Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn (最新林語堂當代漢英詞典), which was edited by Lai Ming (黎明) and Lin Tai-yi, Lin Yutang's son-in-law and daughter, has about 6,300 character head entries and 60,000 compounds or phrases, said to be "what general readers are likely to encounter or likely to use in their daily lives and studies". Compared with the 1720-page original edition, the 1077-page new edition has approximately 1,700 fewer head entries and 40,000 more phrases. The revised edition has five indexes: numerical Instant Index System, simplified "Guoryuu Romatzyh", Wade-Giles, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, and 214 radicals.
A team of scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing developed a free web edition of Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage and published it online in 1999. The web edition comprises a total of 8,169 head characters, 40,379 entries of Chinese words or phrases, and 44,407 explanatory entries of grammatical usage. Chinese character encoding is in the Big5 system (which includes 13,053 traditional Chinese characters), which does not encode simplified Chinese characters or uncommon characters (represented as "□" in the dictionary) included in Unicode's 80,388 CJK Unified Ideographs. The web edition dictionary replaces Lin Yutang's obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh system with modern standard pinyin romanization, which users can hear pronounced through speech synthesis. It also abandons Lin's obsolete Instant Index System, which "has not been widely used since its inception", and provides three machine-generated indexes by radical, pinyin, and English.
Content The Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage comprises approximately 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 word and phrase entries. It includes both modern Chinese neologisms such as xǐnǎo 洗腦 "brainwash" and many Chinese loanwords from English such as yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll" and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie". The lexicographical scope "includes all words and phrases that a modern reader is likely to encounter with(sic) in reading modern newspapers, magazines and books". The dictionary contains an English index of over 60,000 words, which effectively serves as an English–Chinese dictionary. It also includes a table with 2,000 simplified Chinese characters that had come into common use in the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s and 1960s.
The dictionary introduced two new Chinese linguistic systems that he invented, the Instant Index System for looking up characters and Simplified Guoryuu Romatzyh for romanizing pronunciations. Lin claimed a third innovation of being the first dictionary to determine parts of speech for Chinese words, but that distinction goes to the War Department's 1945 Dictionary of Spoken Chinese.
Collation in Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage is by means of Lin's numerical Instant Index System for characters, which he describes as "the culmination of five decades of research". Lin previously developed this system for selecting characters with his 1946 Ming Kwai Chinese typewriter (above). The system's Chinese name shàngxiàxíng jiǎnzìfǎ 上下形檢字法 meaning "character lookup method by upper and lower shape" describes how each character is assigned a four-digit (or optional five-digit) code number according to the stroke patterns in their top left and bottom right corners. In analogy to the more popular Four-Corner Method that assigns a character a four-digit code based upon graphic strokes in the four corners, plus an optional fifth digit, Lin's simpler Instant Index System is sometimes called the "Two-Corner Method".
First, Lin breaks down all Chinese characters into 33 basic stroke formations, called the "letters of the Chinese Alphabet", arranged into ten groups suggested by the characters for numerals. For instance, the character for liu 六 "6" is the mnemonic basic for "letters" 亠 (60), 广 (61), 宀 (62), and 丶 (63). Second, Lin lists the "fifty radicals" (common among the traditional 214 Kangxi radicals) designated with letters A through D, as in 氵 (63A), 礻 (63B), 衤 (63C), and 戸 (63D). Third, characters that can be divided vertically into left and right components are called "split" (S), and those characters that cannot are called "non-split" (NS), thus 羊 and 義 are (NS) while 祥 and 佯 are (S).
Lin's primary rule for the Instant Index is "Geometric Determination: The tops are defined as the geometrically highest; the bottoms are geometrically lowest. They are not the first and last strokes in writing." For example, the four-digit lookup code for 言 is 60.40 since the highest upper left stroke is 亠 (60) and the lowest bottom right stroke is 口 (40). Lin's dictionary lists only three characters 言, 吝, and 啻 in the 60.40 group, but there is a further rule for code groups that list many, such as 81A.40 with ten characters like 鈷 (81A.40-1) and 銘 (81A.40-9), "The Fifth Digit: Top of Remainder" arranges the group's character entries in numerical accordance with the "top of remainder" (character minus "radical").
Romanization in Chinese–English Dictionary of Modern Usage is by "Simplified Guoryuu Romatzyh" (Jiǎnhuà luómǎzì 簡化羅馬字, Jiaanhuah Rormaatzyh in Lin's system) that he developed in 1923 and 1924 as a prototype for the Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) "National Language Romanization" system adopted by the Chinese Government in 1928. Lin also calls this system "Simplified Romatzyh" and "Basic GR".
Both systems represent the four tones of Standard Chinese with different spellings but Lin's simplified GR is more consistent than standard GR. For instance, the word Guóyǔ 國語 ("National Language; Standard Chinese; Mandarin") is romanized Gwoyeu in official GR and Guoryuu in Lin's simplified GR, which exemplifies the difference between systems. Pinyin 2nd-tone guó (國) is GR gwo and "basic" GR guor; and 3rd-tone yǔ (語) is yeu and yuu, respectively. Simplified GR consistently represents tone by the spelling of the main vowel in a syllable, with vowel unchanged for 1st-tone (guo), -r added for 2nd-tone guor (國), vowel doubled for 3rd-tone (guoo), and -h added for 4th-tone (guoh); and similarly yu, yur, yuu (語), and yuh. Standard GR uses these same four tonal spellings for many syllables (tones 1-4 are a, ar, aa, and ah), but changes them for some others, including guo, gwo (國), guoo, and guoh; and yiu, yu, yeu (語), yuh.
Lin Yutang said, "People who are new to this system will doubtless be disturbed by it at first. But they'll get used to it very quickly. I don't need to emphasize the point that the method of building the tone into the spelling of the word fits the modern world of telegraphy, the typewriter and the computer".