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

[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.