Chinese Lexicography in the Twentieth Century

Philological dictionaries focus on words of “language” rather than words of “things”. Those words are collected and selected into the macrostructure of the dictionary on the basis of its compiling principles and the functions it is intended to perform. They are the most fully developed types in the family of Chinese dictionaries with a history of around 2 200 years. The first of such types, The Ready Guide (《尔雅》), “enjoys a very remarkable position in the history of philological and linguistic studies in China” and is “the first work of exegetic studies conducted on a systematic basis” (Yong and Peng 2008: 59). They represent the state of art of Chinese lexicography in both theory and practice and will continue to exert profound, extensive and far-reaching influence.

Under the context of Chinese lexicography, philological dictionaries are classified into three categories, i.e. learners dictionaries, reference or defining dictionaries and academic or scholarly dictionaries. The range of lexical selection in learners dictionaries is limited to 40 000–60 000 headwords, mainly those in common and modern use. The range in reference dictionaries goes from 140 000 to 180 000, with focus on lexical items in modern use, general, special and encyclopedic. The range in research dictionaries extends from 400 000 to 600 000 words, chiefly for the purpose of academic inquiries.

The 20^th-century dictionary making in China underwent a successful transition and transformation from traditional paradigms to innovative models, i.e. from traditions featuring three major dictionary genres—character dictionaries, exegetic dictionaries and rhyming dictionaries—to new undertakings guided and shaped by modern linguistics. Over the 20^th century, Chinese dictionaries developed rapidly with a quick increase of types, which was able to cover almost all dictionary genres, and of numbers, which far surpassed the total of all those produced prior to the 20^th century. Among those made in the 20^th century, philological dictionaries took a lion’s share, performing almost all conceivable functions, fulfilling almost all conceivable categories and proving themselves to be the most popular on the dictionary market.

The reference books published between 1911 and 1993 in China amount to 14 158 varieties, accounting for 95.8 % of what have been produced in the past two thousand years (He Lianhua 1994). The total number of dictionaries produced from October 1949 to 1979 totaled 217 million copies, falling into 891 varieties. Chinese philological dictionaries consisted of 215 varieties and totaled over 170 million copies, those of ethnic languages 48 varieties totaling 0.87 million, and those of foreign languages 103 varieties totaling 20.5 million. Specialized dictionaries took up 524 varieties with a total of over 25 million. It is obvious that the philological category far outnumbered others in terms of copies produced, though not in varieties.

The development of the 20^th-century philological dictionaries in China was concomitant with the evolution of the society and the progress of science and technology, fluctuating and extending with the pulse of the Chinese nation and culture. Before the founding of New China in 1949, the Chinese society was in frequent turmoil owing to wars. As far as philological dictionary compilation was concerned, its scale was limited, and its development relatively slow, though a few large-scale dictionaries were compiled with far-reaching impacts on generations of future dictionary makers. Subsequent to 1949, there was a short period of rapid development. Unfortunately, there came political movements one after another, with the Cultural Revolution pushing them to the peak. As a result, the compilation of philological dictionaries almost came to a halt.

For the last two decades of the century, starting from 1978, the year of China’s implementation of reform and open-door policies, Chinese philological dictionaries started their development on the right track again, and their numbers were on the steady increase. A number of large-scale representative dictionaries served as role models for future compilation and ushered in an era of prosperity for philological dictionaries. The Great Character Dictionary of the Chinese Language (《中华大字典》 Lu Erkui 1862–1935, 1915) became the first of new-style Chinese character dictionaries that were produced over 200 years after The Imperial Character Dictionary of Kangxi (《康熙字典》), initiating innovation in format and style for contemporary Chinese language dictionary compilation, while Ci Yuan (《辞源》, literally “word sources”, Lu Erkui 1915), and later Ci Hai (《辞海》, literally “word ocean”, Shu Xincheng 1936), represented new-style comprehensive Chinese dictionaries embodying the attributes of both philological and encyclopedic types and set the precedent of arranging compound words as sub- entries under single-character headwords.

The National Chinese Language Dictionary (《国语辞典》 Li Jinxi 1937–1945) focused on rectifying the pronunciation of words in contemporary spoken Chinese and initiated the use of signs for phonetic notation and phonetic sequence arrangement for retrieval. The Xinhua Character Dictionary (《新华字典》 1953) was the first of new-type character dictionaries published by state-owned publishing houses after 1949 with a view to launching the Pinyin system, which is a Chinese alphabet of 26 Latin letters that was officially put into use in 1958 for the purpose of phonetically annotating Chinese characters and popularizing Putonghua, i.e. standard Chinese. Several hundred million copies have been issued since its publication. There is no doubt that it remains to be the best-selling book ever published in the world, and no other book in history can reach the extent of its influence.

The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (《现代汉语词典》 1978), which was medium-sized, was intended for the nationwide promotion of Putonghua and the standardization of Chinese. The Great Chinese Character Dictionary (《汉语大字典》 Xu Zhongshu 1986–1990) boasts the largest collection of Chinese monosyllabic characters, which traces the evolution of their forms, pronunciations and significations. The Great Chinese Dictionary (《汉语大词典》, Luo Zhufeng 1986–1994), which is compiled on the basis of historical principles, is the first large-scale philological dictionary with both the normative and diachronic nature and with equal focus on both ancient and contemporary characters for description.

Over the 20^th century, philological dictionaries became gradually mature in type differentiation and more systematic in categorized classification. The Ready Guide and An Explanatory Dictionary of Chinese Characters (《说文解字》) are generally recognized as the origins of the Chinese word dictionary and the Chinese character dictionary respectively, but for a long period in the history of Chinese lexicography, no distinction was made between character dictionary and word dictionary, and all dictionaries were referred to as “character books”. As a result of Chinese evolution, bi-character words increased continuously and were arranged as sub-entries under monosyllabic character headwords, as in The Imperial Dictionary of Kangxi.

In the early 20^th century, type differentiation was made between word dictionary and character dictionary, following the publication of The Great Character Dictionary of the Chinese Language and Ci Yuan, and more genres under each type were created to cater to various levels of user needs, i.e. general philological dictionaries such as The New Character Dictionary (《新字典》 Lu Erkui 1912) and The Xinhua Character Dictionary, which treat characters and words in popular use, comprehensive philological dictionaries such as Ci Yuan and Ci Hai, which treat both lexical words and encyclopedic terms, and special-aspect dictionaries such as The New Dictionary of Dialectal Words (《新方言》 Zhang Binglin 1911), The Function Word Interpreter (《词诠》 Yang Shuda 1928) and The General Dictionary of the Chinese Language (《辞通》 Zhu Qifeng 1934), which deal with specific segments of lexical items or specific aspects of language use.

A survey of distinctive features of Chinese philological dictionaries in the 20^th century can easily identify their evolution into three periods, i.e. the period of innovation and transformation (1900–1949), the period of renascence and retrogression (1950–1976) and the period of stability and prosperity (1977–1999). In the light of the historical segmentation above, this chapter will focus on the evolutional characteristics of the overall development of Chinese philological dictionaries in the 20^th century and the assessment of typical and influential dictionaries so as to form a complete and unified picture over the whole of the century. Dialectal dictionaries and philological dictionaries of ethnic languages, as part of the Chinese philological dictionary family, have demonstrated uniqueness of development and will therefore be dealt with in separate sections.