英文摘要 |
Robert Morrison's Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts (1815-1823) opened new phase to the nineteenth-century Chinese-English lexicography. Before the Dictionary has been published, European Chinese language learners often made use of manuscripts transcribed from the Catholic missionaries', in which all the vocabularies were simply literally translated and paraphrased only without further explainations. Morrison took another way by compiling a dictionary on an encyclopedic scale, which is obviously represented in the first volume of the first part. These partially original entries are important sources to a better understanding of Morrison's thought and work, but it has been mostly overlooked by emphasizing the lexicographical and historical value of the second and third parts. To look into his process of selecting, translating, and integrating various kind of sources into each entry, this paper first demonstrates two typical modes of entry-making in the Dictionary, and then explains how he chose materials, with a view on his experiences of studying and understanding Chinese Literature. |