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

[expectare]

What is with the spam settings? Here is my reply, twice blocked, under another username;

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dictionary is old enough that it might not have even been written in Wade Giles, in which case it would have been outdated by the early 1900s. Additionally, language evolves and an 1870s dictionary focused on the vernacular would have been outdated relatively quickly but still of interest to historians of language or historians in general.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