hero wrote:
> anybody know who write and publish the first chinese
> dictionary?
> there is a big debate in sci.lang in
www.my-deja.com.
> where many koreans tried to claim they are the real
> originator of chinese
> language and others stuffs.
The first work that can be considered a "dictionary" is the _Erya_ 爾雅
(3rd century B.C.), which is reputed to have been written by an earlier
figure, the Duke of Zhou 周. It's one of the Confucian classics. But the
_Erya_ is really more like what what we'd now call a "thesaurus"--it
defined words by giving synonymous words.
But the first "real" dictionary is the _Shuowen Jiezi_ 說文解字 (AD 100), by
Xu Shen 許慎, which was a dictionary of characters (what we'd call
a "zidian" 字典, as opposed to "cidian" 辭典). It was a dictionary of lesser
seal script characters.
Anyway, there was Chinese language and Chinese writing long before
anyone wrote the first Chinese dictionary.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu