A Comparison between Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary and Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage

Abstract

This paper makes a comparison between Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary which is the last Chinese-English dictionary compiled by foreign missionaries, and Lin Yutang’s Chinese English Dictionary of Modern Usage which is the first Chinese-English dictionary compiled by a Chinese. Three aspects of the two dictionaries are studied in this paper, namely the index system, the grammatical information of the lemma and the definition of the lemma. Through comparison, this paper shows the progress that Lin Yutang has made in describing the Chinese language and gives some insight into Chinese-English dictionary making.