A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language
Title page of Williams' Syllabic Dictionary (1896: i)
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| Author | Samuel Wells Williams |
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| Country | China |
| Language | Chinese, English |
| Publisher | American Presbyterian Mission Press |
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Publication date
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1874 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 1056 |
| OCLC | 1921655 |
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai or the Hàn-Yīng yùnfǔ 漢英韻府 (1874), compiled by the American sinologist and missionary Samuel Wells Williams, is the third major Chinese-English dictionary after Robert Morrison's (1815-1823) A Dictionary of the Chinese Language and Walter Henry Medhurst's (1842) Chinese and English Dictionary. Williams' 1056-page bilingual dictionary includes 10,940 character headword entries, alphabetically collated under 522 syllables. Williams was the first Chinese-English lexicographer to correctly distinguish the phonemic contrast between unaspirated-aspirated stop consonant pairs, for instance, giving t'ao for aspirated táo "peach" and tao for unaspirated dào "way; the Dao". While most previous Chinese-English dictionaries only gloss standard Beijing dialect pronunciations, Williams' dictionary also includes variant ones from Middle Chinese and four regional varieties of Chinese, according to the 17th-century Wufang yuanyin 五方元音 "Proto-sounds of Speech in All Directions".
The lengthy English title A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai refers to the influential rime dictionary of Chinese varieties compiled by Fan Tengfeng 樊騰鳳 (1601-1664), the Wufang yuanyin 五方元音 "Proto-sounds of Speech in All Directions" (Yong and Peng 2008: 358-359). A Chinese rime dictionary (as differentiated from a rhyming dictionary) collates characters according to the phonological model of a rime table, arranged by initials, finals, and the classical four tones of Middle Chinese pronunciation.
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