Chhoe-tioh lah! Completely by accident too in a catalogue of books published by the KITLV press.
http://www.kitlv.nl/book/show/1210
It isn't a hard copy, it's an appendix to a Dictionary of Loanwords into Indonesian and Malay. I'm going there again tomorrow, so I might find the publisher's office and ask if I can have a look at the DVD - (CD ROM?)
Even though I haven't seen inside it yet, I have a hunch it will be a bit annoying for fans of benzi. I'm guessing it will be more like the Manual of the Amoy Colloquial style, where the characters reflect common written usage of the early twentieth century. 美 for sui and so on...
Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
Hi Ah-bin,
This is indeed fantastic news! Look forward very much to hearing what you think of it when you've seen it.
From the link you gave (which shows a sample page), the main book itself would be of less interest to me, but perhaps very nice to have anyway.
This is indeed fantastic news! Look forward very much to hearing what you think of it when you've seen it.
From the link you gave (which shows a sample page), the main book itself would be of less interest to me, but perhaps very nice to have anyway.
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
Saw the CD today - has a nice clear PDF of Douglas with characters in nice handwriting, not all the characters mind you, but most of them.
-
Andrew
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
I wonder if they would be willing just to sell the DVD.
By the way, I am now studying for a master's degree in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, so I have access to a huge collection of books on Chinese and Hokkien. Douglas' 1899 edition with Chinese characters is one of them, but also others such as Medhurst, Campbell, Barclay, Talmage, MacGowan, Tipson, etc.
By the way, I am now studying for a master's degree in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, so I have access to a huge collection of books on Chinese and Hokkien. Douglas' 1899 edition with Chinese characters is one of them, but also others such as Medhurst, Campbell, Barclay, Talmage, MacGowan, Tipson, etc.
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
I finally got a chance on the weekend to have a look at the copy I bought last week. It was quite a drama trying to get to Leiden and to find the KITLV (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde), but I'm now so glad I did. [The word-for-word translation of the name of this institute is "Royal Institute for Linguistics, Geography(?), and Ethnology", but it seems to profile itself in English as "Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies".]
As Ah-bin explained, the CD-ROM is provided as an appendix to the book "Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay". It's quite expensive, at 60 euros, but my advice is: run, don't walk, to the nearest place you can get hold of a copy (probably Leiden!) and buy it! It's a huge pdf (a number of gigabytes, from memory) but it's searchable! I'm used to most pdf's being searchable, but usually, pdf's of old documents are not searchable, i.e. they're just a bit-map of the page - recording just the image, like a photo of the page. This is what the internet version of Medhurst is like (http://www.archive.org/texts/flipbook/f ... 00medhrich), for example. But the Douglas/Barclay pdf is searchable. I'm still jumping for joy about this! Not only that, but you can type in POJ without the tone-marks, and it finds the spot in the text where the word is, with tone marks. Being searchable I already consider to be such a big plus, but being searchable without tone marks - even though the text itself has tone marks - is really beyond my wildest dreams
.
PS. As Ah-bin and Andrew would know, a huge number of the entries have the handwritten character beside them, and they are written with a brush, in beautiful handwriting.
As Ah-bin explained, the CD-ROM is provided as an appendix to the book "Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay". It's quite expensive, at 60 euros, but my advice is: run, don't walk, to the nearest place you can get hold of a copy (probably Leiden!) and buy it! It's a huge pdf (a number of gigabytes, from memory) but it's searchable! I'm used to most pdf's being searchable, but usually, pdf's of old documents are not searchable, i.e. they're just a bit-map of the page - recording just the image, like a photo of the page. This is what the internet version of Medhurst is like (http://www.archive.org/texts/flipbook/f ... 00medhrich), for example. But the Douglas/Barclay pdf is searchable. I'm still jumping for joy about this! Not only that, but you can type in POJ without the tone-marks, and it finds the spot in the text where the word is, with tone marks. Being searchable I already consider to be such a big plus, but being searchable without tone marks - even though the text itself has tone marks - is really beyond my wildest dreams
.PS. As Ah-bin and Andrew would know, a huge number of the entries have the handwritten character beside them, and they are written with a brush, in beautiful handwriting.
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
The remarkableness of the achievement of the Douglas pdf may become clearer if one looks at the plain-text equivalent of the Medhurst given above:
http://www.archive.org/stream/dictionar ... h_djvu.txt
[BTW, if I view this link with Internet Explorer 7.0, the whole PC grinds to a halt. Viewing with Firefox 3.5 doesn't seem to have this problem.]
This would appear to be text which has been processed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition, where "character" doesn't mean Chinese characters, but more just plain ASCII - i.e. Roman numerals and letters).
The use of OCR makes the text now searchable, but...
The results are like this (bolding added by me):
BEGINNING OF EXTRACT1
.,.;,.., .'A person, wh<J^ contemplates learning the Chinese language, without much pros-
pect pf verbal intercourse with the people, or who will be generally conversant with
the. higl^r , clashes and Government officers, throughout all the Provinces, would certainly
do weii to study the Mandarin dialect; — but he whose intercourse will probably be
confined to one district, and who will have to do with the great mass of the people
residing in it, would do better to study the vulgar dialect of that particular place.
- -ft f'f >"
The author, on commencing the study of Chinese, attended solely to the Man-
darin, but, finding that it was not understood by the mass of emigrants in the Malayan
archipelago, he turned his attention, in the year 1818, to the Hok-keen dialect. In 1820,
a small Vocabulary was drawn up, and a few sheets of it printed at Malacca ; in 1823,
this work was enlarged, and sent to Singapore, to be printed under the patronage of
the Singapore Institution, the Committee of which offered to publish it at their own
expence. The affairs of that Institution, however, not having prospered, the Manuscript
lay untouched for several years, was since sent to Malacca and Penang, and, in the
year 1829, came back untouched into the author's hands. Considerable advancement
having in the mean time been made in the knowledge of the language, and the Select
vu
Gftfnnjjttee for managing the affairs of the Honorable East India Company, in China, having
gen^rotisly offered to bring the work through the press, the author undertook to re-
compose 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
The preseni work is founded on a native Dictionary of the Hok-keen dialect,
published in the year 1818, called the '\' JL^ Sip gnoe yim, or "fifteen sounds,"
which contains both the Reading and Colloquial idiom, with the sounds and tones very
accurately defined.
END OF EXTRACT1
---
The "pure English" text is bad enough. But if one looks at the OCR'ed parts where there are tone-diacritics on the letters, then the results are even worse:
BEGINNING OF EXTRACT2
In the 30th year "f !^ ^ ^ Han-bootey, B. C. 105, the people of ^ ^ Tong-wat slew T
^S 0"g-6-seen, and tendered their submission to the Government. In the preceding- year, ^P ^^ aS Ong-S-
seen had rebelled, and the Emperor sent his General [^ «S Y4ng-pok to subdue the country ; after which he
transplanted the people to the region between the >/J^ Kang and -Jffi HwaS rivers. The Emperor having con-
sidered that the country of b3 Ban was full of dangerous defiles, and the people ever disposed to revolt, which
would be likely to occasion endless trouble to future ages, resolved on completely removing the inhabitants to
another region, leaving their own country desolate.
In the period of the S- T6ng dynasty, in the 12th year of ^ ^ Swan-chong, A. D. 849, the Emperor
appointed ^^ "i^ I«a E-Yeen-I6ng to be the ruler of ]^ ttii Keen-chew. When Yefin-I6ng came in to return
thanks for the appointment, his Majesty asked, how far Keen-chew was from the Capital? Eight thousand l£, was
the reply. Upon which the Emperor said, "As soon as you come thither, whether yoijr government be good
or bad, I shall be fully acquainted with it: do not say to yourself, it is far off, for teii thousand U are a$ near
to me as the steps of ray throne. Do you know this?"
In the 5th year of ^ ^ E-cUong, A. D. .859, U is wA that m»ny of the ?unuchs of the palace were
Natives of Hok-keen, and had great influence at coart
In the 4th year of '^ ^ He-chong-, A. D. 868, Hok-chew |g j|ij was taken by the rebel H6ng-cha6u
^ M^ C fFu'"S-cha6u ). In the 7th year of the same rergn, A. D. 8TI, arose the rebel ^ ^ Ong-se: he was
a native of S M\\ Sew-chew, in the province of 'v'J^ ^ Kang-lftm, and by trade a butcher. Having collected
a company of about 500 men, he seized upon the government of his native districts and about a month afterwards
got possession of -tt* mi Kong-chew, when his adherents swelled to the number of 10,000. There was a magistrate of
jSi Iffe Koe-s6 district, in the neighbourhood of t^ 'HJ Kong-chew, by the name "f 3£ Jill 0"g-'6*^"> ^^o, together
with his younger brethren, ^ fl-Q Sim-te, and ^E +R Sim-kwuy, was alike distinguished for courage and spirit.
^ ^ Ong-se made this H^ ^M Ong-teaou his Lieutenant-General, and placed much confidence in him.
END OF EXTRACT2
---
Needless to say, the main part of the dictionary - with the Chinese characters and definitions - is pretty close to being unusable (some blank lines removed by me, to save space):
BEGINNING OF EXTRACT3
Bog
Boe
Bog
Boe
Tlie back; the flesh of the back.
Tam bog ^ ^, quiet and still: the
name of a place. Pok hong yew Sa-
bog Che i^y^ij^l']?'^Z
J^^ pdk he^S woo Swa-boi &y tey^ in the northern
region is the desert of Sha-mCh.
An insect that eats the roots of
grain.
A large kind of wheat: g gno lag bog
En ^ ^^ ^' *^"^ ^'"^ '"^ ^^ '"'^
biiyh, he presented me with some large
wheat. See the /j-, ^ Seiou gnay.
END OF EXTRACT3
So, the "searchability" of (the text version of) Medhurst is of no real benefit whatsoever, in contrast to the amazing functionality of the searchable Douglas.
http://www.archive.org/stream/dictionar ... h_djvu.txt
[BTW, if I view this link with Internet Explorer 7.0, the whole PC grinds to a halt. Viewing with Firefox 3.5 doesn't seem to have this problem.]
This would appear to be text which has been processed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition, where "character" doesn't mean Chinese characters, but more just plain ASCII - i.e. Roman numerals and letters).
The use of OCR makes the text now searchable, but...
The results are like this (bolding added by me):
BEGINNING OF EXTRACT1
.,.;,.., .'A person, wh<J^ contemplates learning the Chinese language, without much pros-
pect pf verbal intercourse with the people, or who will be generally conversant with
the. higl^r , clashes and Government officers, throughout all the Provinces, would certainly
do weii to study the Mandarin dialect; — but he whose intercourse will probably be
confined to one district, and who will have to do with the great mass of the people
residing in it, would do better to study the vulgar dialect of that particular place.
- -ft f'f >"
The author, on commencing the study of Chinese, attended solely to the Man-
darin, but, finding that it was not understood by the mass of emigrants in the Malayan
archipelago, he turned his attention, in the year 1818, to the Hok-keen dialect. In 1820,
a small Vocabulary was drawn up, and a few sheets of it printed at Malacca ; in 1823,
this work was enlarged, and sent to Singapore, to be printed under the patronage of
the Singapore Institution, the Committee of which offered to publish it at their own
expence. The affairs of that Institution, however, not having prospered, the Manuscript
lay untouched for several years, was since sent to Malacca and Penang, and, in the
year 1829, came back untouched into the author's hands. Considerable advancement
having in the mean time been made in the knowledge of the language, and the Select
vu
Gftfnnjjttee for managing the affairs of the Honorable East India Company, in China, having
gen^rotisly offered to bring the work through the press, the author undertook to re-
compose 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
The preseni work is founded on a native Dictionary of the Hok-keen dialect,
published in the year 1818, called the '\' JL^ Sip gnoe yim, or "fifteen sounds,"
which contains both the Reading and Colloquial idiom, with the sounds and tones very
accurately defined.
END OF EXTRACT1
---
The "pure English" text is bad enough. But if one looks at the OCR'ed parts where there are tone-diacritics on the letters, then the results are even worse:
BEGINNING OF EXTRACT2
In the 30th year "f !^ ^ ^ Han-bootey, B. C. 105, the people of ^ ^ Tong-wat slew T
^S 0"g-6-seen, and tendered their submission to the Government. In the preceding- year, ^P ^^ aS Ong-S-
seen had rebelled, and the Emperor sent his General [^ «S Y4ng-pok to subdue the country ; after which he
transplanted the people to the region between the >/J^ Kang and -Jffi HwaS rivers. The Emperor having con-
sidered that the country of b3 Ban was full of dangerous defiles, and the people ever disposed to revolt, which
would be likely to occasion endless trouble to future ages, resolved on completely removing the inhabitants to
another region, leaving their own country desolate.
In the period of the S- T6ng dynasty, in the 12th year of ^ ^ Swan-chong, A. D. 849, the Emperor
appointed ^^ "i^ I«a E-Yeen-I6ng to be the ruler of ]^ ttii Keen-chew. When Yefin-I6ng came in to return
thanks for the appointment, his Majesty asked, how far Keen-chew was from the Capital? Eight thousand l£, was
the reply. Upon which the Emperor said, "As soon as you come thither, whether yoijr government be good
or bad, I shall be fully acquainted with it: do not say to yourself, it is far off, for teii thousand U are a$ near
to me as the steps of ray throne. Do you know this?"
In the 5th year of ^ ^ E-cUong, A. D. .859, U is wA that m»ny of the ?unuchs of the palace were
Natives of Hok-keen, and had great influence at coart
In the 4th year of '^ ^ He-chong-, A. D. 868, Hok-chew |g j|ij was taken by the rebel H6ng-cha6u
^ M^ C fFu'"S-cha6u ). In the 7th year of the same rergn, A. D. 8TI, arose the rebel ^ ^ Ong-se: he was
a native of S M\\ Sew-chew, in the province of 'v'J^ ^ Kang-lftm, and by trade a butcher. Having collected
a company of about 500 men, he seized upon the government of his native districts and about a month afterwards
got possession of -tt* mi Kong-chew, when his adherents swelled to the number of 10,000. There was a magistrate of
jSi Iffe Koe-s6 district, in the neighbourhood of t^ 'HJ Kong-chew, by the name "f 3£ Jill 0"g-'6*^"> ^^o, together
with his younger brethren, ^ fl-Q Sim-te, and ^E +R Sim-kwuy, was alike distinguished for courage and spirit.
^ ^ Ong-se made this H^ ^M Ong-teaou his Lieutenant-General, and placed much confidence in him.
END OF EXTRACT2
---
Needless to say, the main part of the dictionary - with the Chinese characters and definitions - is pretty close to being unusable (some blank lines removed by me, to save space):
BEGINNING OF EXTRACT3
Bog
Boe
Bog
Boe
Tlie back; the flesh of the back.
Tam bog ^ ^, quiet and still: the
name of a place. Pok hong yew Sa-
bog Che i^y^ij^l']?'^Z
J^^ pdk he^S woo Swa-boi &y tey^ in the northern
region is the desert of Sha-mCh.
An insect that eats the roots of
grain.
A large kind of wheat: g gno lag bog
En ^ ^^ ^' *^"^ ^'"^ '"^ ^^ '"'^
biiyh, he presented me with some large
wheat. See the /j-, ^ Seiou gnay.
END OF EXTRACT3
So, the "searchability" of (the text version of) Medhurst is of no real benefit whatsoever, in contrast to the amazing functionality of the searchable Douglas.
-
Andrew
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
Wow. I guess there's no chance of them just selling the CD? Would like to know your experiences of trying to use the search function as an English-Hokkien dictionary equivalent.
-
Andrew
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
Actually, I've been looking for a Malay etymological dictionary for some time, so I just ordered the book.
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
Happy to hear it. Even though you probably have access at SOAS to a paper copy***, I think you'll love it, particularly the searchability.Andrew wrote:Actually, I've been looking for a Malay etymological dictionary for some time, so I just ordered the book.
The book is in itself worth having: a very scholarly analysis of the non-Nusantara words (i.e. they exclude Javanese, Sundanese, etc, so they try to record only the (originally) "truly" foreign words) in Indonesian and Malay. When I looked at the list, I was amazed (i.e. it's a whole book full), and then I realised that this supported my earlier point about "living languages" - almost all languages which are alive borrow/adopt words from other languages. The ones which don't are either dead (e.g. Latin) or moribund. There is the odd one or two, like Icelandic, which coins/coined new words out of native roots, but even that was probably a socio-linguistic fact from pre-1980's. With globalization, I'd venture to say that modern Icelandic is also full of English loan-words.
***: I mean the paper copy with the characters manually written in - I assume you've always had a paper copy without, in your own home.
Re: Douglas with Handwritten Characters!
One very subtle point.Andrew wrote:Actually, I've been looking for a Malay etymological dictionary for some time, so I just ordered the book.
In the introduction, the editors take great care to point out that it's not an etymological dictionary, in the sense that a standard etymological dictionary explains (as far as possible) the origins and earlier forms of all (or as many as possible of) the words in the language. Here, the editors have gone for something slightly less ambitious, and only tried to find the origins of all "non-Nusantara" words (the main source languages being Sanskit, Tamil, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, English, and the Chinese dialects, including Mandarin). They specifically exclude the Austronesian languages (particularly all the Malay-related ones of Indonesia) because they are considered to be the "natural sources" of Indonesian anyway.
That's not to deny that such an etymological dictionary would eventually be needed, just to say that it would have been overwhelming for them to try and do that, in the current state of lexicography of Indonesian/Malay.
In any case, their introduction is very detailed, and the explanation of their methodology and goals is fascinating. A really scholarly work!