From Chronic to Acute: R.H. Mathews
Today I went to my favourite neighbourhood bookstore on a quest for some early works of Y.R. Chao. While I didn’t find what I was looking for I did spend some time with Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary. It was the 1960 edition but included the preface from the 1943 edition. Excerpt below.
With books no longer coming from the Far East, the need for Chinese dictionaries in this country has grown from chronic to acute. To answer the immediate demands of American students, the Harvard-Yenching Institute has undertaken to revise and reprint two practical dictionaries, (1) C H Fenn’s Pocket Dictionary, which appeared in November 1942, and (2) the present Chinese-English Dictionary by R.H. Mathews, both photolithographed reproductions.
A few things interested me about this particular dictionary. One is of course the historical context. This is 1943. The Allies for the most part give up on extraterritoriality, Chiang Kai-shek becomes president of the Republic, and thing aren’t really quiet in China aside from that.
Another is the use of Zhuyin Fuhao in the 1960 edition. Pinyin had been established by then but was still very much in its infancy at the time of publication. It seems later versions did switch over to Wade Giles, but it wasn’t without errors. Here’s a paragraph from a review on the Amazon page linked above. Emphasis is my own.
There are several problems with the Mathews dictionary, and the old Romanization is the least of them. More disturbing are Mathews’s erroneous pronunciations, which are too frequent. You cannot rely on him at all for tones, for example. In the second edition, the great Y.R. Chao went through all of the entries and corrected many of Mathews’s errors–but the press did not re-alphabetize the entries to reflect the corrected pronunciations, so if you are looking up a character with a pronunciation that Mathews happened to get wrong, you’ll have to go back and use the stroke index to find it, unless you want to try and guess which mistaken reading Mathews might used. Both alternatives are irritating.
I’m curious about this for two reasons. First, I wonder what the likelihood is that the tones described had changed since then, or if he was just wrong a lot. Lacking any real knowledge of the language at the time, I can’t answer that. Second, and I only read the above review after returning home, I wonder how much the switch from Zhuyin to Wade-Giles affected the alphabetisation of the book. Words under ㄕ [ʂ] and those under ㄙ [s] may have been intermixed in the Wade-Giles version.
I didn’t end up picking up the book which was priced at 400RMB (60USD), but I’m quite tempted to grab it next time I’m there. I could always use another tome around the house. Donations welcome.
UMass has a brief biography on Mathews which itself is interesting for the transliteration system used. I can only assume they used OCR which couldn’t get a grasp on the Yale/Wade-Giles blend. Their biography also includes the full text of the introduction.
At the risk of crossing the line into micro-obsession, I leave you with a paragraph from a letter by one Achilles Fang sent to Ezra Pound on the subject of Mathew’s dictionary in response to Pound’s previously asking “Is M[athews] dead? Or only at Harvard? Or why do they print his dic[tionary]?“
Not much information about REV. Robt Hentry Mathews of China Inland Mission. He certainly has nothing to do with Harvard.
The people here pirated his horrible dictionary during the last war—principally in order to make Yankee boys gabble in broken mandarin with the pretty lasses of Cathay.
Ah yes, the lasses of Cathay. Fang goes on to say how after the war a representative of Mathews’ approached Harvard for the IP theft only to be turned away when reminded that books published in China had no copyright protection abroad. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The romanization system used in the biography of Matthews is the Common Alphabetic system (http://www.umass.edu/wsp/reference/conventions/romanization/ca1.html); Bruce & Taeko Brooks, who are behind U Mass Amherst’s Warring States Project (http://www.umass.edu/wsp/) always seem to use this system, which I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere.
Nice post. I’d love a copy of the Matthews dictionary too, but not at those prices.
Incidentally, the romanization system on that UMass page is supposed to be like that: the page is part of E. Bruce Brooks’ Warring States Project, which includes some wonderful biographies of luminaries in the Sinological field. One of Brooks’ creations is his own system of romanization, which he argues will be easier for the general public to read than Pinyin. It’s a decent enough system, actually, and pretty straightforward if you’re familiar with Yale (which I always thought got a bad rap), but I’m not so sure that a naive reader will find “Hvnan” any more obvious than “Henan” or “Ho-nan,” or “Ywaen” more obvious than “Yuan.”
Interesting. I was almost certain it was OCR error to blame. Various web searches produced nothing useful when searching the romanised forms.
Definitely something I’ll be checking out. Thanks, both.
I first bought Mathews’ dictionary as a graduate student, on the recommendation of some of my first teachers of Classical Chinese. It’s a great dictionary, nicely bridging the gap between modern Mandarin (circa 1930) and Classical Chinese. The dictionary is a wonderful hodge-podge of romanizations and standards, since it was first put together based on the old 1913 Standard Chinese, then revised in various ways to accommodate newer standards and various romanizations and transcriptions. All the revisions over the years were made not by resetting the copy, but by marking up the existing pages and then making photolithographic reproductions of earlier editions.
As a result, Mathews’ preserves what is known traditionally as the jiān-tuán distinction (romanizing 經 differently from 精), and marks all rù-tone words distinctly as well (for example 月 has tone “4.5”). It’s therefore pretty useful if you are interested in making educated guesses about Nanjing or Cantonese pronunciations. I am not aware of significant numbers of tone errors; in fact, I am suspicious of the claim made by the Amazon reviewer. I wonder if this might be a misunderstanding–perhaps the reviewer is not aware of the nature of the changes in the Chinese standard.
ㄕ [ʂ] and ㄙ [s] are clearly distinguished in all cases.
I still refer to Mathews’ with some frequency.
Zev: Out of curiosity what edition of the book do you have?
It’s the 1943 edition (ISBN 0-674-12350-6), which includes the introduction and editorial corrections of Y. R. Chao. I purchased it in 1991 or so, and so far as I know it was in print at that time, but I can’t find a clear indication of the date of printing. The printer’s key on the copyright page reads “20 19 18 17 16 15”, so I gather that this is the 15th printing of the edition.
[…] is aimed at teaching the sound system of Chinese, those three don't fit really well. I guess …From Chronic to Acute: R.H. MathewsIncidentally, the romanization system on that UMass page is supposed to be like that: the page is […]