Chapter 21 The second section "Ciyuan" - the first large-scale comprehensive Chinese dictionary
"Ciyuan" is my country's first large-scale comprehensive dictionary that mainly focuses on words and includes encyclopedias. It can be said to be a new and epoch-making dictionary in terms of the knowledge content collected and interpreted, as well as the style of compilation. A new dictionary of meaning.
Editing and updating of "Ciyuan" "Ciyuan" was edited by Lu Erkui, Fu Yunsen and Cai Wensen.Lu Erkui (AD 1863-1935), styled Pusheng, nicknamed Weishi.A native of Wujin County, Jiangsu Province.Juren in the seventeenth year of Guangxu (1891 AD) in the Qing Dynasty, entered the Commercial Press in 1906, and began the compilation of "Ciyuan" in the spring of the thirty-fourth year of Guangxu (1908 AD), with the purpose of developing people's wisdom and popularizing cultural and academic knowledge. Adapt to the needs of the society at that time.Dozens of people participated in the editing work successively.It took eight years until "Ciyuan" was compiled in 1915.The Commercial Press published the main edition in October 1915 in five formats: A, B, C, D, and E.After the publication of the main edition, new terminology was continuously produced, and the society required corrections and additions, so there was a sequel, edited by Fang Yi, and published in December 1931.The style of the continuation is still the main edition. Compared with the two, the main edition pays attention to ancient words, and the continuation widely collects new terminology. In June 1939, it was being continued and published in one volume.In the bound edition, supplements were made to the missing words in the main and continuation editions, and texts and expressions were corrected. A short edition was published in 1949, which condensed the content and only 1/3 the length of the original book.After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Commercial Press "in view of the increasing number of new words and the excessive length of the old edition, decided to delete the old words and simplify them and add new words. This work was completed at the end of 1948. In 1949, when the country was liberated..., A large number of new nouns have been added, collected in the continuation, until the end of 1949, listed at the end of the chapter as an addendum." This is the adapted version of "Ciyuan" published in November 1950 (in miniature).From the compilation of "Ciyuan" in 1908 to the founding of the People's Republic of China, the continuation, addition, and adaptation during this period were mainly due to the continuous enrichment of new terms with the passage of time, while the purpose of the original compilation has not changed.
The characteristics of "Ciyuan" "Ciyuan" is based on the old calligraphy books, rhyme books, and class books, and fully absorbs the compilation methods and style characteristics of modern foreign new dictionaries.It focuses on words and collects encyclopedic terms; it aims to popularize knowledge and provide it for the general society;
(1) Ciyuan collected 13,000 single characters, recovered more than 50,000 words, added more than 30,000 entries in the sequel, and claimed to have collected more than 100,000 entries.Not only collect words, idioms, allusions, common sayings, idioms, etc. from the perspective of words, but also collect items related to classics, history, geography, laws and regulations, cultural classics, and art museums from ancient books from a practical point of view, especially from modern social sciences, In natural science and applied technology, new nouns and terms are widely collected, as well as names of people, places, and books from ancient and modern China and abroad.It contains so many entries and a wide range of categories that it is unprecedented in history. It can be called a comprehensive encyclopedia dictionary integrating ancient and modern Chinese and foreign, old knowledge and new learning.
(2) In the annotations, the fanqie phonetic notation of "Yinyun Chanwei" is first used for each word, and some of them also add straight pronunciation and indicate the rhyme part to which it belongs.Where there are multiple pronunciations of a character, the phonetic notation is cut separately, and then the meaning of the word is explained item by item under different pronunciations, and documentary evidence is given to explain.
For each entry, it also explains one by one and cites documentary evidence.Generally, the meaning and usage of the words are first explained under the entry, and then the proof is cited; It is enough to replace the explanation. In order to avoid repetition, only the quotation is recorded without explanation; in order to avoid redundant quotations, some do not record the original text, but only summarize the main idea, and then indicate the source; some common sense entries only give In summary description, without citing the source of words.It can be seen that the interpretation method of "Ciyuan" is not only well-organized, but also flexible and practical according to the different contents of the entries.In addition, to aid interpretation, diagrams are inserted in the book.
(3) Checking "Ci Yuan" borrowed from "Kangxi Dictionary"'s radical and stroke sorting method, and classified 13,000 individual characters under 214 radicals; and referred to "Pei Wen Yun Fu" and "Pian Zi Lei Bian" The way of collecting words is to use a single character as the prefix, and to list the compound words with this single character as the prefix under the prefix.The arrangement of the individual characters in the same radical is in order according to the number of strokes, with the few in the front and the most in the back.The arrangement of complex words under each single character is based on the principle of "number of words" first and then "strokes". The ones with the most characters are listed first, and the ones with the most characters are listed last; for those with the same second character, the number of strokes of the third character is used as the order, the one with the fewest characters is listed first, and the one with the largest number is ranked last.So on and so forth.This arrangement method makes the arrangement and inspection of entries orderly, and subsequent dictionaries such as "Ci Hai" have followed this example. "Ciyuan" pioneered the comprehensive arrangement method of "radicals, strokes, and words with words".In addition, the revised "Ciyuan" adopts new punctuation marks.
When "Ciyuan" was compiled and published, it was the time when my country's democratic revolutionary movement was flourishing and Western learning was spreading eastward. Its interpretation of traditional culture provided a lot of new insights on the basis of fully absorbing previous research results. It satisfies the public's requirement of "understanding allusions"; and the collection and explanation of new Western words also meets the public's needs of "gathering new knowledge". "Ciyuan" is not only an ancient Chinese dictionary for reading ancient books, but also an enlightenment tool for spreading new ideas.It and "Ci Hai" published by Zhonghua Book Company were both popular for a while, and had a great impact on improving the level of Chinese culture and education at that time.However, there are many mistakes in "Ciyuan".Mainly: there are many omissions in the collection of some terms and terms in social politics, economics, and natural sciences. Some of the explanations are wrong and one-sided, and some are outdated due to the advancement of the times; The explanations are either wrong or plausible; some of the entries are incorrectly selected; the citation formats of the cited books are different, and some of the cited books are not marked with sub-titles; the arrangement of the entries with the same strokes is not regular, and so on.After liberation, according to the principle of division of labor with "Ci Hai" and "Modern Chinese Dictionary", the state began to revise and recompile "Ci Yuan" in 1958, and published the first revised version of "Ci Yuan" in 1964, from 1979 to 1983 The Commercial Press has successively published four revised editions of "Ciyuan", and in 1989 a bound edition was published.After the recompilation of "Ciyuan", all the entries of modern natural science, social science and applied technology in the old "Ciyuan" were deleted, and it mainly included ancient dictionaries and entries related to ancient cultural relics, laws and regulations, and became a content-rich book. A practical ancient Chinese dictionary.
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