Walter H Medhurst Dictionary: An Insight into Hokkien in the 19th century
Go BackIn 1831, Walter H Medhurst compiled one of the earliest dictionaries of spoken Hokkien. It is one of the earliest works to show the use of Church Romanization to spell out words in the Amoy Dialect or Xiamen variant of the Hokkien language. Mr Medhurst wrote an intro to his dictionary that offers a fascinating glimpse into Chinese languages in the 19th century context, and into Hokkien in particular. To make his write-up easy to read, I have taken the liberty to revise, modernize and paraphrase some sections from it. In this passage, the term Mandarin refers to Literary Chinese, the written language used back then, and not Modern Standard Mandarin that is used today.
Considering there are already so many and elaborate works on Chinese Philology already out there before the Public, getting one more into the open almost seems to need an apology, were it not that the objective of this present Dictionary is not so much to elucidate Literary Chinese, also known at that time as the Mandarin tongue or Court Dialect, but that of one of the lesser known Chinese languages. Previous efforts have been confined to the Court Dialect, with the exception of a Canton Vocabulary published in 1828, and as far as I know nothing has yet been done to describe the Hokkien language.
The Mandarin language is partially understood throughout China by a large percentage of its population. In some central provinces of China, it is said to be the current language of the people. However, in the southern provinces, the local dialects differ significantly from the Court Dialect, and in Fujian Province, where the difference is most marked, the cultivation of the Mandarin tongue is less general. Having never visited China, I have had no opportunity to converse with Chinese people of higher ranks, and have been limited in my interaction with the middle and lower class Chinese who emigrate to the Malay Archipelago. From my experience, over the last fourteen years of being in Malaya, I have not come across a single Chinese man in five hundred who can speak Mandarin, or can carry on a conversation of more than ten words in it.
In Fujian province, if a doctor, a fortune-teller, a stage-player, or a police officer were to meet someone who has travelled from another province, or has been employed by the Government, a chicken and duck situation would arise. In most cases, the Hokkien people would be totally unacquainted with the Mandarin language, having never thought to study it until and unless, having succeeded at the literary examinations, they obtained a prospect of Government employment, that they would go to a school to study Mandarin, and there, they would acquire it almost as they would a new language. Indeed, instances have been known of literary graduates of considerable standing giving up the prospect of Government jobs rather than take the trouble of studying Mandarin.
Not only does the Mandarin language differ from the everyday language used by the Hokkien people, but the various regional languages also differ considerably from each other. As an example, the native of Fujian Province will not be able to understand a native of Guangzhou. I myself, on many an occasion, had to interpret for two Chinese persons coming from different parts of southern China, as they could not understand each other. Even in the same province, the difference of dialect is sometimes so great, that communities divided by a mountain, a river, or twenty miles of country are by no means intelligible to each other. In the ten counties of Fujian Province, there are certainly as many different dialects, and if the same is true of the 23 provinces, 4 municipalities, 5 autonomous regions and 2 special administrative regions of China, the different languages and dialects will be nearly two hundred.
A person who is keen to learn the Chinese language, if he doesn't have much opportunity to talk with the common people, but is more likely to converse with the higher classes and the Government officers of all the provinces of China, would certainly be better off studying Mandarin. However, if he wants to converse with the people of any specific district, then he had better learn the spoken dialect of that particular place.
When I started studying Chinese, I did so solely on Mandarin or Literary Chinese, but, on finding out that it was not understood by the mass of emigrants to Malaya, I turned my attention in the year 1818, to the Hokkien language. In 1820, I drew up a small Vocabulary comprising a few sheets and had it printed in Malacca. In 1823, I expanded on this work and sent it to Singapore to be printed under the patronage of the Singapore Institution, which had offered to publish it at their own expense. Unfortunately, the Institution was not financially sound, so the Manuscript remained untouched for several years. It was sent to Malacca and then to Penang, and in 1829, it came back untouched into my own hands.
During that period, a considerable advancement had been made in the knowledge of the Hokkien language. A Select Committee for managing the affairs of the East India Company in China offered to get my work published. So, I undertook to recompose it entirely, expanding it by several thousand characters, and to illustrate the meaning of each principal word with a quotation from some respectable Chinese authors.
The present work is founded on a native Dictionary of the Hokkien language published in the year 1818. It was called Sip Ngor Im, meaning "fifteen sounds." It contains both the reading and spoken pronunciations, with the sounds and tones very accurately defined.
The people who speak Hokkien have a method of expressing themselves in common conversation that is very different from the style in which their books are written. This variation appears not only in the substitution of more easy and familiar words for the abstruse and difficult terms used in books, but also in the inflection and alteration of even common words, giving them sometimes a nasal or contracted ending, and sometimes completely changing their sound and tone. This has given rise to the difference between the Reading and Spoken forms of speech, which, in the native Dictionaries, are distinguished by having the former printed in red ink, and the latter in black. I do the same by printing the spoken or colloquial pronunciation in italics while the reading pronunciation in regular roman letters.
The Chinese also have a method of spelling their words. They divide the words into initials and finals. Sometimes they take the initial of one word and the final of another, and form a third word using a conjunction. In the native Dictionary alluded above, fifteen initials and fifty finals are employed, to express all the possible variations in sound, of which the Hokkien language is capable. These initials and finals are hereafter described, and attempted to be expressed in European letters. The system of orthography which has been adopted to bring out these sounds may not possibly be the best, and no doubt they would be differently expressed by other people; but whatever may be the faults or deficiencies of my system, I am happy to say that it is uniform, that any given word will be found to bear the same orthography throughout the work.
In compiling this dictionary, I consulted Walker's and Sheridan's pronunciation dictionaries but found that it is impossible to adopt their systems in every instance, as the Hokkien language contains sounds which neither of these two persons had ever illustrated. The nasal sounds, in particular, cannot be accurately expressed by any possible system of European orthography, and if twenty people were to define them, they would no doubt write them in as many different ways.
I have therefore adopted the methods that seems best to me, following in many instances the orthography by Dr Morrison in his Dictionary of the Mandarin tongue, where the sounds resembled each other. Having adopted it, I found it necessary to adhere to the same method throughout my dictionary in order to prevent mistakes and confusion.
In addition to the sounds formed by the fifteen initials and fifty finals, speakers of the Hokkien language have a method of multiplying their few monosyllabic words by applying various tones. While the syllables retain the same spelling, alteration of the tones multiplies the number of words available. Of the people who study the Chinese language, some considered intonation to be of the highest importance while others have paid it little or no attention. I personally considers it very important, having found from my own experience, that if I do not pay strict attention to the tones, it would be impossible for me to make myself understood in Hokkien.
I observe that Chinese children, from the moment they learn to speak, would learn the tones as speedily as they do the sounds themselves. I can well say that I have never heard a native speaker of Hokkien make the slightest mistake in the tones, even in the hurried conversation of common life. Indeed a Chinese is more likely to make a mistake in pronouncing a syllable than in expressing the tone, and when charged with mispronouncing a word, will defend himself, by saying that, at any rate the words are in the same tone, and therefore there cannot be much difference between them.
Please bear with me if you come across any mistakes in this dictionary. It is being printed some two thousand miles away from where I am. So it is impossible for me to correct the sheets as they are put to press, or to mark out any errors which might have inadvertehtly dropped from my pen in the composition. I am greatly indebted to the Reverend Dr Morrison and his son, who have kindly undertaken the revision of the proofs. My earnest hope is that they may succeed in the difficult task of reading and comparing the very minute distinctions, of accent as well as sound which I have found necessary to employ in the work, and that they may submit this manuscript as correctly as could be desired.
I express my thanks to the Directors of the Honorable East India Company, and to the Gentlemen of the Select Committee for the management of their affairs in China for their great patronage of my dictionary, and for publishing it for me, free of charge, at their own printing press in China. May this feeble undertaking help advance the understanding of Chinese literature, and may students of the language, whether for civil or religious purposes, derive essential benefit from using it. I thank God for giving me the good health to complete this undertaking and to bring it to completion.
Walter H Medhurst, Jakarta, 29 July 1831
Read also Penang Hokkien Vocabulary
Learn Penang Hokkien with Memrise
Now you can use the most user-friendly tool on the web to learn Penang Hokkien. It helps you to listen, understand and memorise. Go to Memrise, and learn Penang Hokkien at your own pace.
Return to Penang Hokkien Resources
Songs about Penang
About this website
Hello and thanks for reading this page. My name is Timothy and my hobby is in describing places so that I can share the information with the general public. My website has become the go to site for a lot of people including students, teachers, journalists, etc. whenever they seek information on places, particularly those in Malaysia and Singapore. I have been doing this since 5 January 2003, for over twenty years already. You can read about me at Discover Timothy. By now I have compiled information on thousands of places, mostly in Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, and I continue to add more almost every day. My goal is to describe every street in every town in Malaysia and Singapore.
Copyright © 2003-2024 Timothy Tye. All Rights Reserved.