Committee for managing the affairs of the Honorable East India Company, in China, having generously offered to bring the work through the press, the author undertook to recompose it entirely, to enlarge it by the addition of several thousand characters, and to illustrate the meaning of each principal word by a quotation from some respectable Chinese author.
The present work is founded on a native Dictionary of the Hok-këèn dialect, published in the year 1818, called the 十五音 Si̍p gnoé yim, or “fifteen sounds,” which contains both the Reading and Colloquial idiom, with the sounds and tones very accurately defined. The inhabitants of Hok-këèn have a method of expressing themselves in common conversation, very different from the style in which their books are written; and this variation appears, not only in the substitution of more easy and familiar words for the abstruse and difficult terms used in books, but also in the inflection and alteration of even common words, giving them sometimes a nasal or contracted termination, and sometimes completely changing their sound and tone. This has given rise to the distinction between the Reading and Colloquial forms of speech, which, in the native Dictionaries, are distinguished, by having the former printed in red, and the latter in black ink; while the same is attempted to be marked in the following work, by putting the Colloquial in italics, and printing the Reading idiom in roman letters.
The Chinese have a method of spelling their words, by dividing them into initials and finals, and taking the initial of one word and the final of another, they form a third by the conjunction. In the native Dictionary above alluded to, fifteen initials (hence the name) and fifty finals are employed, to express all the possible variations in sound, of which the Hok-këèn dialect is capable. These initials and finals are hereafter described, and attempted to be expressed in European letters; the system of orthography which has been adopted to elucidate these sounds may not possibly be the best, and no doubt they would be differently expressed by others; but whatever may be the faults or deficiencies of his system, the author flatters himself that it is uniform, and that any given word will he found to bear the same orthography throughout the work. Walker’s and Sheridan’s pronouncing Dictionaries have been consulted, but it was found impossible to adopt their systems in every instance, as the Hok-këèn dialect contains sounds, which neither of those orthoëpists had ever occasion to illustrate. The nasals, in particular, can be accurately expressed by no possible system of European orthography, and if twenty people had to define them, they would no doubt write them in as many different ways; the author has therefore adopted that mode of spelling which appeared
