The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary ...

Sitro-Platonic. P(q)ers., 1 (February, 1986)Koinc), Sanskrit (Vedic. Prakritic. Buddhist Hybrid), and Latin(Ciccronian, Low. Ecclesiastical, Medieval, Ncw, etc .). If we canagree that there are fundamental structural diffcrcnces between modernChinese languages and classical Chinese, perhaps we can seerhe need for devising appropriately dissimilar dictionaries for theirstudy.One of the most salient distinctions between classical Chineseand Mandarin is thc high degree of polysyllabicity of thc lattervis-it-vis the former. There was indeed a certain percentage of trulypolysyllabic words in classical Chinese, but these were largely loanwordsfrorn foreign languages, onomatopoeic borrowings from thespoken language. and dialectical expressions of restricted currency.Convcrsely, if one were to compile a list of the 60,000 most comrnonlyused words and expressions in Mandarin, onc would discoverthat more than 92% of these are polysyllabic. Given this configuration.it seeriis odd. if not perverse. that Chinese lexicographersshould continue to insist on ordering their general purpose dictionariesaccording to the sounds or shapes of the first syllables ofwords alone.Even in classical Chinese, the vast majority of lexical items thatneed to be lookcd up consist of rnore than one character. The numberof entries in multiple character phrase books (e.g., P'ieil-tzu lei-pieii[approximately 110.000 entries in 240 chiiun] . P'ei-werz yiiil-fu[roughly 560,000 iterris in 212 clliin~tJ) far exceeds those in thelargest single character dictionaries (e.g., Chung-hua fti tzu-tien[48,000 graphs in four volumes], K'crilg-hsi tzil-ficrr [49.030graphs]). While syntactically and granimatically Inany of these multisyllabicentries may not be considered as discrete (i.e. bound)units, they still readily lend then-rselves to the principle of single-sortalphabetical searches. Furthermore. a large proportion of graphs inthe exhaustive single character dictionaries were only used once inhistory or are variants and ~niswritten forms. Many of the111 areunpronounceable and the meanings of others are impossible to determine.In short, rnost of the graphs in such dictionaries are obscureand arcane. Well over two-thirds of the graphs in thcsc comprehensivesingle character dictionaries would never be encountered iil the erltir-o