Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1980

Publication of L i s Chinese Dictionary The L i's Chinese Dictionary, recently published by The Chinese University Press, was compiled by Dr. Choh-ming Li, former Vice-Chancellor of this University. Chinese dictionaries published so far have either arranged the characters by their meanings, by the syllabary minus the in itia l consonant, or by using the 214 radicals. Users who do not know the meaning or the rhyme of a character often have difficulties in locating it in a Chinese dictionary. Also, words grouped under a radical do not have the same pronun ciation. The L i's Chinese Dictionary is the first dictionary to break away from these traditional classi fication methods. This 680-page dictionary groups more than 12,000 commonly used characters into just over 1,100 categories, mostly in accordance with their phonetic components so that every character in each of the categories has the same phonetic root. Such an arrangement facilitates the location of characters in the Dictionary. The Kuo-yu and Cantonese pronun ciations given in the Dictionary reflect the evolution undergone by both and, to some extent, the pronun ciations in relation to each other. A special feature of the Dictionary is the “ Fan" indexing system under which Chinese characters having the same number o f strokes are arranged in the order of "the dot" ( 、 ）， "the downward slanting stroke to the le ft" ( 丿), "the vertical stroke" ( 丨 ), “ the downward slanting stroke to the right" ( \ ), and “ the horizontal stroke" ( 一), in Chinese calli graphy. This order is comparable to the sequence in the opening of a fan. The publication of this Dictionary is financed by a private donation from Drs. S. H. Ho, J. S. Lee, and Q. W. Lee and the late Mr. Harold Lee. Dr. Choh- ming Li, who spent over fifteen years, primarily after office and on public holidays, to complete this remarkable work, has generously offered to contribute the proceeds from the sales of the Dictionary to the University's Institute of Chinese Studies for its research programmes. 27