Was my forebear's Mandarin dictionary any good?

[kjthistory]

One of my ggg-grandfathers had a brother named George Carter Stent, who was born in Canterbury (Kent, England) about 1831. As part of my family history research, I'm writing up a narrative of his life.

Amongst a number of other works, in 1871 George published "A Chinese and English Vocabulary in the Pekinese Dialect" followed in 1874 by "A Chinese

Comments

[redxcrosse]

why is everything being marked as spam? reposted reply:

Oh, he didn't necessarily go wrong anywhere, and it probably isn't rubbish at all, though I'd need to see the dictionary itself before passing judgment on its quality. "Confusing and bizarre" was descriptive, not pejorative. Sorry, let me back up and explain some things about romanization history. Nowadays Chinese has a standardized romanization system called pinyin and pretty much everyone regardless of country of origin (unless the country of origin is Taiwan) uses it. IIRC it was developed by some socialists in the 20s and didn't become standard until 1949 and then wasn't used (for political motivations, especially in the United States) until the 1990s, when westerners started actually living in China en masse again and had found they had to accommodate the Chinese. It is now to the point where EVERY dictionary that isn't politically motivated (these all use wade giles) or used for historic research purposes will use pinyin.

But before there was pinyin, there were a lot of competing and nonstandard systems that varied across languages. If you wanted to read Chinese romanization in English you'd use one of a dozen systems, if you wanted to read it in French you'd have to use another. The only thing close to a standard in English prior to 1949 is the wade giles system, which is nowadays used only in Taiwan (as a political statement) or by cranky American rightists who are willing to annoy and alienate their readers. To give you an idea of what this means, I read Chinese and I cannot read wade giles without difficulty. The last generation of westerner chinese scholars and speakers who can read wade giles easily are the ones who graduated college in the 80s.

George's dictionary is old enough that it might not have even been written in Wade Giles, in which case it would have been outdated by the early 1900s. Additionally, language evolves and an 1870s dictionary focused on the vernacular would have been outdated relatively quickly but still of interest to historians of language or historians in general.

A tl;dr way of saying this is that Mr Stent used a confusing and bizarre (or outdated and nonstandard if those words don't seem neutral enough to you) system and so his dictionary is no longer used and would only be of interest to nerds like me.

[kjthistory]

Thanks for this - I've only just seen the "three suspicious comments" in tiny letters at the bottom of the page. I've unspammed all three so you can now delete some if you want to. I can only think it was because of the link - LJ is very inconsistent in whether it allows links or not.

Anyway, thank you for this information; I'll look into finding out what romanisation system George used. Somewhere I got the impression he invented his own methods, but I could be wrong on that.

And yes, "bizarre" does come across as very judgemental to me!

[redxcrosse]

Now that is interesting. I'd assumed it was WG initially, but if it was only 1871...then probably he did use his own. If I could see the dictionary I'd be able to answer your other questions about quality. I'm not sure where I'd find a copy since I don't live in a place with universities with strong Chinese programs anymore, so if you could find one and post pictures here that'd be great and other Chinese speakers could pitch in to answer your questions about quality.

I apologize for the misunderstanding over bizarre, which I was using as a synonym for nonstandard. We're using different registers; just so you know if I'd wanted to say it was HORRIBLE I'd have gone in for "fucked up" or "stupid."

[kjthistory]

I use and interpret "bizarre" as "Why the hell would someone do that? What were they smoking? That is totally without rational explanation and suggests a trip to the psychiatric ward might be in order." So a little stronger than "non-standard"!

As to romanisation, I've always wondered why Peking suddenly and without a word of explanation became Beijing, and I hadn't even realised that it was at the same time as Mao Tse-Tung became, er, whatever he is now.

I found this: "Confronted by internal problems with romanizations and external movements towards a standardized national language based on Beijing pronunciations, Co-Director General Henri Picard-Destelan ( 鐵 士 蘭 1878-?) announced in early December 1919 a new study of romanization being undertaken by the Directorate with “a view to introducing a uniform system” of spellings for foreigners based on the proposed national language ... The governing dynamic, however, was that southern Mandarin spellings were to be abandoned in favor of the Beijing-based transcriptions of Wade or G. C. Stent (司登德 1833-1884), a former Customs employee who had compiled a lexicon of Beijing “dialect” in 1871."

As to the work itself, this is all I've found so far http://www.archive.org/stream/mandarinromanize00macguoft/mandarinromanize00macguoft_djvu.txt

but it's typical OCR stuff insofar as columns are completely borked and therefore fairly unreadable. It's getting past my bedtime now but I'll do some more searching tomorrow, because I would love to have some idea of how much of a ground-breaker George actually was.