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Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (Ganesha - Western Linguists and The Languages of China)
Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect - Ganesha - Western Linguists and The Languages of China Author:Robert Morrison Morrison's Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828) was the first Western attempt to compile a glossary for a dialect, and its publication was sponsored by the East India Company at a time when the opium trade was in full swing. In large part, the concern to provide a glossary of items of trade and useful phrases for commercial communicati... more »on appears to have dictated the scope of the work. In the introduction, Morrison laments the difficulties attendant upon such a task, and notes that '[t]he names of foreign articles of commerce in Canton are very irregularly and variously written among different shopmen and dealers' and that '[n]ames of goods are sometimes entirely foreign: at other times a translation of foreign Names; and occasionally they are half Chinese and half foreign'. The work is divided into three parts, 'English and Chinese', 'Chinese and English', and 'Chinese words and phrases'(including a useful section on 'Wicked Banditti').« less