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Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese

Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
Concise Dictionary Spoken Chinese.jpg
Front cover of Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese.
Author Yuen Ren Chao, Lien Sheng Yang
Country United States
Language Chinese, English
Publisher Harvard University Press
Publication date
1947
Media type print
Pages xxxix, 292
OCLC 3393465

The Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (1947), which was compiled by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang, made numerous important lexicographic innovations. It was the first Chinese dictionary specifically for spoken Chinese words rather than for written Chinese characters, and one of the first to mark characters for being "free" or "bound" morphemes according to whether or not they can stand alone as a complete and independent utterance.

The compilers of the Concise Dictionary of Chinese, the linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982) and the historian Yang Lien-sheng (1914-1990), were famous Chinese-American scholars who worked in Harvard University wartime Chinese language programs for the War Department. Chao was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1941 to 1946, while Yang entered the graduate program in 1940, and received an M.A. in 1942 and Ph.D. in 1946.

At the beginning of World War II, the shortage of Chinese and Japanese bilingual dictionaries became an urgent matter for English-speaking Allies. The Harvard–Yenching Institute said the need for Chinese dictionaries in America had "grown from chronic to acute", and selected two "practical dictionaries" to revise and reprint—without either author's permission—for "the immediate demands of American students" (Mathews 1943: v). Both photolithographic reproductions were retitled: The Five Thousand Dictionary (5th ed., 1940) became Fenn's Chinese-English Pocket-Dictionary (1942) and A Chinese-English Dictionary: Compiled for the China Inland Mission by R. H. Mathews (1931) became Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary (1943). Y. R. Chao contributed to both these reprints. He revised the introduction and wrote the Standards of Pronunciation, Styles of Pronunciation, and Tones sections for Fenn's (1942: xxii-xxiv), and wrote the Introduction on Pronunciation for Mathews' (1943: ix-xvii).


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