Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: When was the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary first published?
Computers (namely, the "C" in "ABC Dictionary") were purposefully involved in almost every stage of dictionary compilation and publication in order to facilitate further advances in electronic lexicography and software development. In 1997, the Wenlin Institute published "Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese" with about 14,000 head entries (version 1.0) and entered into a licensing agreement with the University of Hawaii to utilize the "ABC Dictionary" database in Wenlin software. The first edition "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (1996) was incorporated into Wenlin 2.0 with over 74,000 entries (1998); the second "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (2003) went into Wenlin 3.0 with over 196,000 entries (2002); and the third edition "ABC English-Chinese/Chinese–English Dictionary" (2010) was incorporated into Wenlin 4.0 (2011), which includes 300,000 Chinese–English entries, 73,000 Chinese character entries, and 62,000 English-Chinese entries.
Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his "Advanced Chinese Reader", estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the "Shuowen Jiezi" lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the "Jiyun" of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
As the last two of these features indicate, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. This form remained prestigious long after the capital moved to Beijing in 1421, though the speech of the new capital emerged as a rival standard. As late as 1815, Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on this koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing dialect was gaining in influence. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.
Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC, but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC). Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy. As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese. In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to the standard spoken language ("Mandarin"). Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.
In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two canonical forms, called simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in mainland China in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and easier to memorize. The People's Republic of China claims that both goals have been achieved, but some external observers disagree. Little systematic study has been conducted on how simplified Chinese has affected the way Chinese people become literate; the only studies conducted before it was standardized in mainland China seem to have been statistical ones regarding how many strokes were saved on average in samples of running text.
It is difficult to establish exactly how many different Chinese characters are in use today; the new HSK, a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language, tests over 2,600 different characters, whilst in 1988 the People's Republic of China published the "List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese" which contains 7,000 different characters. In Japan, where a smaller set of characters are in general usage, the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyō kanji, meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
The "Britannica" is the English-language encyclopaedia/encyclopedia that was in print for the longest time: it lasted 244 years. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, as three volumes. (This first edition is available in facsimile.) The encyclopaedia grew in size: the second edition was 10 volumes, and by its fourth edition (1801–1810) it had expanded to 20 volumes. Its rising stature as a scholarly work helped recruit eminent contributors, and the 9th (1875–1889) and 11th editions (1911) are landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary style. Beginning with the 11th edition and following its acquisition by an American firm, the "Britannica" shortened and simplified articles to broaden its appeal to the North American market. In 1933, the "Britannica" became the first encyclopaedia to adopt "continuous revision", in which the encyclopaedia is continually reprinted, with every article updated on a schedule. In March 2012, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced it would no longer publish printed editions, and would focus instead on "Encyclopædia Britannica Online".
Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit the second supplement; Onions turned 84 that year but was still able to make some contributions as well. The work on the supplement was expected to take about seven years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement "(OEDS)" had grown to four volumes, starting with "A", "H", "O", and "Sea". They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing the complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement.
In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the Soviet Chinese people, like most sizable ethnic groups in the early USSR, had a writing system based on the Latin alphabet developed for them; it was used to publish a number of periodicals. A separate, different, Latin-based writing system was simultaneously developed for the Dungans, who were already considered a separate ethnic group. This was accompanied by a broader campaign to raise literacy among Chinese workers, estimated at just one-third in 1923. By the 1930s, there were ten state elementary schools, one vocational secondary school, one college, and two evening schools using Chinese as their medium of instruction.
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (often abbreviated to ODB) is a three-volume historical dictionary published by the English Oxford University Press. With more than 5,000 entries, it contains comprehensive information in English on topics relating to the Byzantine Empire. It was edited by Alexander Kazhdan, and was first published in 1991. Kazhdan was a professor at Princeton University who became a Senior Research Associate at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC before his death. He contributed to many of the articles in the Dictionary and always signed his initials "A.K." at the end of the article to indicate his contribution.
Although there are more than 40,000 Chinese characters in written Chinese, many are rarely used. Studies have shown that full literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local language varieties or dialects, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The differences are similar to those within the Romance languages, with variation particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast. A widely quoted classification divides these varieties into seven groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Hakka and Yue, though a more recent classification splits some of these to obtain ten groups, and some varieties remain unclassified.
It is not uncommon to encounter children who grew up with a regional variant of Mandarin as their parent tongue with little or no fluency in a Wu variety at all. However, this is primarily when parents are speakers of different languages and communicate in Mandarin and more rarely due to the parents' attitudes towards using language or dialect, which most associate with the warmth of home and family life. Many people have noticed this trend and thus call for the preservation and documentation of not only Wu but all Chinese varieties. The first major attempt was the "Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects", which surveyed 2,791 locations across the nation, including 121 Wu locations (a step up from the two locations in PKU's earlier surveys), and led to the formation of an elaborate database including digital recordings of all locations; however, this database is not available to the general public. The atlas's editor, Cao Zhiyun, considers many of these languages "endangered" and has introduced the term (Languages in danger) or "endangered dialects" into the Chinese language to raise people's attention to the issue, while others try to draw attention to how the dialects fall under the scope of UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage and as such deserve to be preserved and respected.
The "Britannica" was the idea of Colin Macfarquhar, a bookseller and printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver, both of Edinburgh. They conceived of the "Britannica" as a conservative reaction to the French "Encyclopédie" of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which was widely viewed as heretical. Ironically, the "Encyclopédie" had begun as a French translation of the popular English encyclopedia, "Cyclopaedia" published by Ephraim Chambers in 1728. Although later editions of Chambers' "Cyclopaedia" were still popular, and despite the commercial failure of other English encyclopedias, Macfarquhar and Bell were inspired by the intellectual ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment and thought the time ripe for a new encyclopedia "compiled upon a new plan".
In Hong Kong, Cantonese became the dominant language spoken in society since widespread immigration to Hong Kong began from the 1940s onward. With immigrants of differing mother tongues, communication was hard without a dominant language. With Cantonese originating from the capital of neighboring Canton province, Cantonese became the dominant language by extension, and other similar dialects started to vanish from use in Hong Kong. Original residents, or aboriginals, of Hong Kong used their own languages including the Tanka, Hakka and Waitau dialect, but with a majority of Hong Kong's population being immigrants by the 1940s and 50s, the dialects vanished at a rapid rate. Most of Hong Kong's younger generation does not understand, let alone speak, their ancestral dialects.
Throughout East Asia, Literary Chinese was the language of administration and scholarship.
Although Vietnam, Korea and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, these were limited to popular literature.
Chinese remained the medium of formal writing until it was displaced by vernacular writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Though they did not use Chinese for spoken communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations, which provide clues to the pronunciation of Middle Chinese.
Chinese words with these pronunciations were also borrowed extensively into the local vernaculars, and today comprise over half their vocabularies.
Journey to the West is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In English-speaking countries, "Monkey", Arthur Waley's popular abridged translation is well known.
In 1604 he was recruited for one of the Cambridge committees set up to translate the Bible into English. He also served in the "Second Cambridge Company" charged by James I of England with translating the Apocrypha for the King James Version of the Bible. As well as his own work, he assisted in the work of the "First Cambridge Company" translating from Chronicles to Canticles. Six years later, when the work was done, the different translations were reviewed by six scholars for the final publication. Bois was one of their number. The Bible was then published in 1611.
In January 1995, Project Gutenberg started to publish the ASCII text of 
the "Encyclopædia Britannica", 11th edition (1911), but disagreement about the method halted the work after the first volume. For trademark reasons this has been published as the "Gutenberg Encyclopedia". Project Gutenberg has restarted work on digitising and proofreading this encyclopedia. Project Gutenberg has published volumes in alphabetic order the most recent publication is "Volume 17 Slice 8: Matter–Mecklenburg" published on 7 April 2013. The latest "Britannica" was digitized by its publishers, and sold first as a CD-ROM, and later as an online service.
Although a phonetic Korean alphabet, now known as Chosŏn'gŭl or Hangul, had been created by Sejong the Great, it did not come into widespread official use until the late 19th and early 20th century. Thus, until that time it was necessary to be fluent in reading and writing Hanja in order to be literate in Korean, as the vast majority of Korean literature and most other Korean documents were written in Literary Chinese, using Hanja as its primary script. Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the 1990s), or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. Learning a certain number of Hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, and for enlarging one's Korean vocabulary. Today, Hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in Hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—"Hanja-eo" ()—are written with the Hangul alphabet most of the time, with the corresponding Chinese character often written next to it in order to prevent confusion with other characters or words with the same phonetics.
Yanfang Tang, professor of Chinese at the College of William and Mary, says the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" "stands above its peers as one of the most comprehensive, informative, and useful tools in the study of and dealing with the Chinese language" (2005: 145). This dictionary is a valuable asset for several types of users. Native speakers will particularly benefit from the "authentic and accurate English translations" of Chinese words and phrases, which are an improvement over sometimes "stiff and awkward" translations in previous Chinese–English dictionaries, which were edited predominantly by Anglophone native speakers of Chinese. Chinese–English translators, students of Chinese as a foreign language, and compilers of Chinese language textbooks will find this dictionary indispensable for providing comprehensive linguistic information. Nonnative speakers of Chinese will find the dictionary handy to use, and those who are accustomed to alphabets will find locating a Chinese word in this alphabetically arranged dictionary "almost an act of second nature". Advanced learners of Chinese who have a firm command of pinyin will also benefit, especially in cases when they know how to pronounce a word but do not remember how to write it, and will be able to quickly find the character (2005: 145).
Michael Sawer, who also reviewed the original "ABC Dictionary", calls this comprehensive dictionary an "outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries" (2004: 313). He makes comparisons between the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (called ""ABC"") and two bilingual dictionaries aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning English: the "Han-Ying Da Cidian" (Wu 1993, ""CED"" Chinese–English Dictionary) and "Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: Han-Ying Shuangyu" (CASSIL 2002, ""CCD"" Contemporary Chinese Dictionary).
Prior to the alphabetically arranged "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary", virtually every Chinese dictionary was based upon character head entries, arranged either by character shape or pronunciation, that subsume words and phrases written with that head character as the first syllable. While pronunciation determines the placement of words within the unconventional "ABC Dictionary", Chinese characters still determine the position of words within a standard dictionary. Comparing a Chinese character-based dictionary with the pinyin-based "ABC Dictionary" illustrates the difference. "The Chinese–English Dictionary" (Wu 1979: 431) locates the head character entry "lín" 林 "① forest; woods; grove ② circles …" as one of 14 characters pronounced "lín", and alphabetically lists 17 words with "lín" as the first syllable, for instance, "línchǎnpǐn" 林产品 "forest products", "línhǎi" 林海 "immense forest", and "línyè" 林業 "forestry". The "ABC Dictionary" includes "lín" 林 "① forest; woods; grove ② forestry…" as one of 6 characters pronounced "lín", followed by alphabetically listed "lin"-initial headwords from "línbā" 淋巴 "lymph" to "línfēng" 臨風 "facing against the wind", but then "ling"-initial words begin to appear with "líng" 〇 "zero", and only after another three pages will one find "lìngzūn" 令尊 "(courteous) your father" followed by "línhǎi" "immense forest" (McGinnis 1997: 568). DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" is aptly described as having "defied the tyranny of Chinese characters" (Clark 2001: 387).
Reviews of DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" were published by major academic journals in linguistics (e.g., "The Modern Language Journal"), Asian studies ("Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"), and sinology ("China Review International"). Most reviewers criticized certain aspects, such as the difficulty of looking up a traditional Chinese character, but also highly evaluated the innovative dictionary.