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When was the first dictionary written in the English language?

How was the first Chinese-English dictionary written?

  • And how did the person who wrote the first Chinese-English dictionary learn Chinese/English?

  • Answer:

    Western missionaries to China often learned the local language, as many spent the greater part of their lives in China, so it was natural that they developed lexicons for their own use and to help teach other missionaries. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) gained fluency in the Chinese language, including classical Chinese writing, and is widely credited with creating the first Chinese-European dictionary in collaboration with other Jesuit missionaries (and no doubt with the help of Chinese scholars).  This dictionary was Chinese-Portuguese, as the Portuguese colony of Macau was the main center for Chinese-foreign interaction at the time. The Scottish missionary Robert Morrison (1782-1834) compiled the first Chinese-English lexicon in the 1820s, but the first proper Chinese-English dictionary is considered to be that compiled in 1892 by the British diplomat Herbert Giles (1845-1935). As for how these Westerners learned Chinese (and how their Chinese teachers and collaborators learned European languages) before the advent of proper dictionaries, you would have to trace this back hundreds and even thousands of years. At a very basic level, there is a universal human language that is very easy to communicate without sharing a common spoken language (for concepts such as "I'm hungry", "good", "bad", or "Hey baby, you look mighty fine.") Once people have established first contact, they learn from each other very quickly. In many cases, early contact between diverse languages if facilitated by a shared third language.  Chinese traveling the Silk Road might, for example, learn how to communicate in Uyghur, Persian or Turkish and then be able to communicate with European traders that also had some facility in those languages.  There is often a continuum of bilingual or multilingual speakers that help to bridge respective parts of the gap between two very distant languages and cultures. Early learners naturally start to make their own vocabulary lists to help themselves learn and to pass the knowledge on to their friends or students.  These sorts of resources gradually accumulate over time, with each generation of learner improving on the work of his/her predecessors.  Even if they don't have a proper dictionary, most foreign language learners therefore have some sort of reference material to refer to. Chinese and Europeans have been interacting and communicating with each other some way or another along the Silk Road since the days of Marco Polo (1254-1324), so even early pioneers like Matteo Ricci would not have been working in a complete vacuum.

Mark Rowswell at Quora Visit the source

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Specifically regarding " the person who wrote the first Chinese-English dictionary" (Morrison, as others have said) and other Englishmen in China in the late 18th  - early 19th century ( e.g. the members  of the  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy ) : they usually were able to get some help with Chinese from the Portuguese in Macau (who, of course, had been working with Chinese since the 16th century). As to the Portuguese themselves: in the early years of their operations off the China coast and in Macau (16th c.) they did not seem to learn much Chinese; it appears that early on the interpretation and translation was done by ethnic Chinese people (some coming from Malacca, which of course got exposed to the Portuguese invasion early on); by the 1540s, the historian João de Barros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_de_Barros in Lisbon already had a literate Chinese slave working for him.  And the earliest conversations between the Portuguese invaders and the people of Malacca must  have been carried out using some other languages commonly used in the Indian Ocean trade at the time - there was  a regular trade between India and Malacca, so there must have been people speaking both Persian and Malay, for example. As other commenters have noted, the Macau-based Portuguese only started to seriously learn Chinese in the last quarter of the 16th century, thanks to the efforts of Ricci, Ruggieri, and other Jesuits. Incidentally, the Spanish friars in the Philippines had a similar effort going on as well, but it floundered when Juan Cobo's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Cobo ) ship sunk in 1592.

Vladimir Menkov

I have a great Chinese-French character dictionary sitting in my living-room picked up in an antique bookstore. It goes through the evolution of each character, and explains it all in French-style pinyin. This, too, was compiled by Jesuits.

William White

Not quite an answer to your question (because it refers to English), but Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary, was the first person to compile a Chinese dictionary for any European language. It was written some time between his arrival in Zhaoqing in 1583 and his expulsion six years later.

Steve McConville

In 1978 upon the instruction of Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou, tens of scholars in Beijing Foreign Studies University finished the first edition of the first Chinese-Enlgish dictionary《汉英词典》after 8 years of hard work. Those scholars were all born Chinese and learned English abroad during their 20s or 30s. they made up of the first team of English teachers of China.

Feng Carol

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