An Etymological Dictionary of Written Chinese

This is a part-time project which I expect to take a couple of years, at the least. There is a large effort at the University of California at Berkeley to produce a dictionary (a thesaurus, really) of so-called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the ancestor to Chinese and other related languages, spoken some six thousand years ago. This project is called Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (or STEDT for short). It builds upon the work pioneered by the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren, who was the first to study systematically the phonetic construction of Middle and Old Chinese.

However, this and many similar efforts focus on spoken Chinese; written Chinese has, relatively speaking, taken a back seat. With my limited resources, I cannot hope to produce anything original; I can only compile and make use of existing references wherever possible. To this end, I am basing my dictionary on Dr L Wieger's Chinese Characters, 2nd edition. This project grew out of admiration for this text and a simultaneous frustration with its format. While it is perhaps suitable for teaching Chinese etymology, its haphazard organization makes it difficult to use as a reference source. One must follow pointers twice or even three times to find the desired character.

My reorganization will present the material in dictionary form, ordered phonetically. Each character will be given in its current canonical style, followed by its historical writing or writings, and an etymology into components. Each character will give a short definition, as well as any logical or phonetic derivatives.

In its final form, the dictionary will probably comprise some two or three thousand main entries, plus an additional five to ten thousand phonetic derivatives, which will largely be cross-references to the main entries. Even at a reasonably brisk pace, the main entries will take about a year, the phonetic derivatives another year, and then one more year to put the entire dictionary into printable form.

Here's what a couple of sample entries might look like, for those of you with Big5 encoding capabilities:

【本】 (ben3) [< = the part of the tree near the ground; cf. 末 (mo4)] tree trunk; by extension, basis, origin.

【襌】 (dan1) [phonetic complex = 衣 (yi1) + 單 (dan1)] an unlined garment.

If you are interested in the progress of the project, please send mail to me at brian@isi.edu. Thanks!

Links

A similar work, with less emphasis on the original or small seal forms of the characters can be found at Rick Harbaugh's http://zhongwen.com/.

Wenlin is a product for Macs and PCs that does translations of on-line documents (in both directions). Its dictionary features some historical development of the characters. Wenlin has its own home page at http://www.wenlin.com/.