Description:

"TIE CHIU VOCABULARY"
Unique and significant unpublished early manuscript dictionary of a dialect of Chinese, "Tie Chiu Vocabulary", hand-written by WILLIAM DEAN (1807-1895), an American Baptist missionary who served in Bangkok and Hong Kong from 1833 to 1884, translating the Bible and other Christian texts into Chinese. This volume, approx. 260pp. legal folio, is a dictionary of the Teochew dialect of Chinese, which is spoken in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong, in Southeastern China, and which preserves many Archaic Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary. Dean, who appears to have appropriated a ledger book for his purposes, groups together characters utilizing the same base and having similar connotations. These characters, likely executed by a Chinese collaborator, are recorded in black calligraphic ink in one column, with the base character in red at the top of each page, to which Dean adds the pronunciation in the column to the left of each character, and a definition in English to the right. In this way, Dean and his assistants record more than four thousand expressions in the Teochew dialect. The volume has been placed in a modern binding of brown leather. The edges of the pages bear moderate worm damage, and noticeable toning and foxing, but remain perfectly legible. The original brown leather spine covering, with the partial title and the author''s name in gilt, is also present. An extremely important, one-of-a-kind document, likely the first academic record of the Teochew [Chaozhou] dialect ever compiled.

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November 17, 2016 11:00 AM EST
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