Periplus Pocket Mandarin Chinese Dictionary: Chinese-English English-Chinese (Fully Romanized)

426 Pages·2017·2.69 MB·English

by  Philip Yungkin Lee

Published by Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
www.periplus.com
Copyright © 2017 Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-7946-0775-3; ISBN: 978-1-4629-1950-5 (ebook) Printed in
China
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Contents
Introduction
Pronunciation
Chinese–English Dictionary
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
W
X
Y
Z
English–Chinese Dictionary
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Introduction
This Pocket Dictionary is an indispensable companion for visitors to
China and for anyone in the early stages of learning Chinese. It contains
all the 12,000 or so Chinese words that are most commonly encountered
in colloquial, everyday speech.
For the sake of clarity, only the common Chinese equivalents for each
English word have been given. When an English word has more than one
possible meaning, with different Chinese equivalents, each meaning is
listed separately, with a clear explanatory gloss. The layout is clear and
accessible, with none of the abbreviations and dense nests of entries
typical of many small dictionaries.
The language represented in this dictionary is Modern Standard
Chinese, which is also commonly known in English as Mandarin, and in
China as Putonghua (literally “Modern Standard Chinese”) and Taiwan
as Guoyu (literally “national speech”).
The People’s Republic of China has a population of over 1.35 billion
people, more than 90% of whom are ethnically Chinese. They speak a
large number of related languages, often collectively referred to as
“Chinese dialects.” Many of these are mutually unintelligible in their
spoken forms, although they are united by a common system of writing
(see further below).
The main language groups are Mandarin, spoken in a broad area
across the north and west of the country, Kan, Xiang, Wu, Northern Min,
Southern Min, Hakka, and Cantonese. Most of these also contain within
them a wide range of dialectal variation, especially as regards
pronunciation and elements of vocabulary.
Modern Standard Chinese is based on the northern Mandarin dialects
of the area surrounding the capital Beijing, and the standard
pronunciation is that traditionally used in Beijing. Its use has been widely
promoted as an instrument of national unity since the overthrow of the
Manchu monarchy by the native Han Chinese in 1912, and especially
since the founding of the PRC in 1949. Nowadays most people in China
have a good knowledge of it even if they do not commonly speak it in
daily life.
The written form of Chinese does not relate directly to the sounds of
the language. Instead it makes use of a very large number of characters
representing different syllables, to each of which is linked both a meaning
and a sound. The meaning attached to each character is the same for
each of the Chinese languages and dialects, although the way it is
pronounced may well be different. In this way writing can serve as a
means of communication between Chinese from geographically
separated regions who would not be able to understand each other’s
everyday speech.
The characters derived initially from the stylized representation of
concrete objects, to which the abstract meanings needed for the
expression of the whole language have been added by processes of
combination and metaphor. The earliest written records of Chinese date
back to the second millennium BCE, in the form of marks scratched on
bones and shells used in a system of divination. The shapes of these
characters are very different from the modern forms, but the development
of the script from a directly representational system is already well
advanced.
Classical Chinese literature dates from around 1500 BCE, and there
has been some development of the characters over the succeeding
centuries. Since the 1950s the government of the PRC has promoted the
simplification of a number of characters that are complex in formation or
contain a large number of strokes, and the reform has also been adopted
in Singapore. All the Chinese words and phrases in this dictionary are
written in these simplified characters. In Taiwan and Hong Kong the
traditional forms of the characters are mostly still used, but the simplified
forms are also readily understood.
In this dictionary every Chinese word and phrase is also given in the
Roman alphabet, following the official system of transcription
promulgated in 1958 and known as Hanyu Pinyin. A guide to the
pronunciation of the romanized forms is given on the following pages.
Chinese is a tonal language, and it is extremely important to use the
correct tone in pronouncing each syllable. In this dictionary the tones are
indicated by diacritical marks over the vowels.
The words and phrases in the Chinese–English section of the
dictionary are arranged in English alphabetical order using the letters and
diacritical marks of the Hanyu Pinyin system of romanization. Words that
have the same spelling but different tones are listed in order of their
tones: first, second, third, fourth and neutral tone. For example, “ǎi 矮
short” comes before “ài 爱 to love.” Words that have the same spelling
and the same tone are listed according to the complexity of the Chinese
characters. For example, “gān 干 dry” with three strokes comes before
“gān 肝 liver” with seven strokes.
Although the writing system and pronunciation of Chinese may be
daunting for English speakers, grammatically it is not too problematic.
There are no inflections as such (distinctions such as tense and number
being indicated by various particles) and the word order is generally the
same as in English.