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

[klausnick]

Stent's ability in studying Chinese, and particularly his aptitude for its colloquial form, attracted the attention and encouragement of the then British Minister (Sir) Thomas Wade

[kjthistory]

Thanks for this; I've seen the Takao Club's write-up before and it is indeed very useful. However, I'm hoping that somebody can give me more information on George's reputation and the experience of using his dictionaries.

[orange_fell]

Re-posted to avoid being marked as spam!!

I did a quick search and Stent's vocabulary and pocket dictionary are not held by any of the libraries in the University of California system. WorldCat did find 2 copies each in France and Denmark. Anyway, that would seem to count against it being relevant today.

I also found a digital copy of the "Chinese-English Vocabulary," but you may have to be logged in through a university to access it: (http:// excluded) babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b76974

[green_knight]

Worldcat is not reliable on this one - the Bodleian has copies of several of Stent's books.

It's also worth mentioning that it might be filed or reviewed under the name of the co-author (Hemeling, Karl Ernst G.) - a quick trip to google scholar suggests that might be the case.

(In general I would agree, as there seem to be few quotations and no reprints.)

Edit: at least one of the Bod's digital holdings - Scraps from my Sabretache (c'mon, with a title like that, I had to take a look) is under creative commons licence - it looks as if archive.org has a whole bunch more including the dictionary.

[kjthistory]

Many thanks for the additional name - that will give me a few more things to google. And I'd never heard of google scholar either, so that's another plus, thank you so much!

I've read Scraps from my Sabretasche a couple of times(*); it's very interesting matching up George's account of happenings in India with the regimental records, but I was particularly interested in his early life in Canterbury. The early chapters where he mentions his mother (my gggg-grandmother) coming in and getting the c/o to give him embarkation leave when no-one else was getting it were fantastic to read for me, along with his descriptions of the town.

I was really hoping for feedback from anyone who has actually used or appraised George's work in developing the dictionary - I seem to be out of luck on that, but once again thank you very much for your input.

(*) I got hold of a hard copy by Inter-Library Loan from, iirc, the University of Aberdeen, and I've also got a version from, I think, archive.org

[kjthistory]

Please ignore and forget the previous reply under the wrong id!

Thank you very much for doing this. I read somewhere that various updates had been based on George's work, but obviously 140 years is a long time in any field. There's very little point in me actually looking at the dictionary - I have no intention of learning Mandarin and wouldn't be able to judge its quality - but many thanks for the link, which I will try out anyway just in case.

[redxcrosse]

if it was published in 1871 then it has a confusing and bizarre romanization system that is no longer used today.

[kjthistory]

I'm not sure that calling George's work "confusing and bizarre" really counts as rubbishing it "nicely" as I requested, and it doesn't tell me anything about where he went wrong, but thank you for your input. It does at least explain why his work is no longer in use.

[redxcrosse]

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

[expectare]

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

[redxcrosse]

why is everything being marked as spam? reposted reply

[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.

[cattiechaos]

I really hope you don't mind my intruding onto your post - as I really have nothing of relevance to say in regards to what you asked - but if I may, how does one go about trying to trace a family history? I've heard that birth/death/marriage certificates aren't usually released until 50 or so years after the individual in question has been deceased, so I can't find documents/files anywhere online. I can see that tracing your lineage is quite important to you so I hope you don't mind that I thought to ask! :-)

[kjthistory]

Hi, no worries! It looks to me from your journal as if you're in the US? (Correct me if I'm wrong). I have the impression from Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone books that it's a great deal easier in the States to get access to birth/death/marriage certificates than it is here, but it looks as if you have to know which Records Office to visit in the first place

[kjthistory]

By 1940 I'm guessing that the surnames will be spelt the same on the certificates and on the census, but the further back you go the more you have to be creative in thinking about the variations - not just in the spelling differences, but how the indexers have read the handwriting on the census form. I have found Cates indexed as Cater, for example, and Haydon spelt as Headon and Heydon.

It's true that a lot of detailed information is not available online until at least fifty years have passed, but indices are available, and that may well be enough to get you started. The index will probably tell you the names of the parties, the year, presumably the State and perhaps the county or even the town.

I would suggest your first step - after talking to relatives - would be to buy one or two monthly family history magazines. Most of them have a "getting started" page, and just reading through the letters page and the problems page will give you lots of ideas on how to go about things. Also, if you have an unusual name anywhere, it's always

[cattiechaos]

Thank you so much for your thorough reply! I am indeed from the U.S. although my parents hail from two different counries. For that reason I am unsure if I can access the files of those countries unless I go there in person. They came over to the U.S. in their mid-20's so I can find a marriage license but other than that, not so much. I think that I'll go about researching how to access the files in those countries in addition to asking around my family. Sorry this is such a short reply, but I really do appreciate the effort you put into this! It really helped and it's rather inspiring to see someone so passionate about tracing their family lineage. Once again, thank you!