Présentation de l'éditeur
Work is to supply the demand for a dictionary at once portable and inexpensive, and at the same time sufficiently large to meet the wants of an ordinary student. According toG iles 6,000 characters are sufficient to furnish a fount for aC hinese newspaper, and this number, says the same authority, is an ample stock-in-trade for any scholar. With a view to ascertain which 6,000 characters were likely to be the most useful, an analysis was made of the Four Books and Commentary, theS acred Edict, the Three Character Classic and Commentary, theB ook of Rewards and Punishments, theO ld and New Testaments, Old Testament History, the Pilgrim sP rogress, and Martin sE vidences of Christianity. The analysis of these volumes shewed that they contained about 5,500 separate characters. These were supplemented by nearly 600 more from various sources, bringing the total to 6,089, or if different forms of the same character be included to 7,264 The use of these has been copiously illustrated by examples drawn fromM orrison, Williams, Legge, Giles, Mayer, Chalmers, Hirth, Mateer, and others, as well as from the aforementioned and other native books. These examples might easily have been multiplied, but it seemed neither necessary nor advisable to do so. For instance, the names of birds, beasts, fishes and plants alone, would have more than doubled the size of the book; and as many of these have purely local names, it seemed better to omit them. Technical terms, too, have been sparingly inserted, not only from considerations of space, but also on the ground that they are best dealt with separately. In many sciences also the terminology is unsettled, and it seems extremely likely that in time the Chinese will make technical vocabularies of their own. Notwithstanding the omissions, there still remain about 40,000 examples enough to meet the needs of most students. An Appendix
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
Présentation de l'éditeur
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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