Xinhua pinxie cidian (review)

This work is a major contribution toward resolving the vexing problems involved in determining the zhengcifa or "orthography" of Chinese written in the official alphabetic system called Pinyin. It is the author's second important contribution in this area, the first (with Mary Felley) being a work in English: Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography (Beijing: Sinolingua, 1990). That Yin has produced a work in English on this subject attests to the importance of Pinyin orthography not just for the Chinese but for non-Chinese as well.

In point of fact, the matter of who needs help in the orthography area needs to be specified in greater detail than Yin has provided because the needs of various groups of people in various concrete situations should be the basis for determining the rules of orthography. The specific rules that Yin advances can best be judged on the basis of these varying needs.

The main body of the dictionary consists of two parts, part 1 devoted to Specialized Terms and part 2 to Common Terms.

Part 1 is further divided into place names, personal names, publication names, names of organizations and units, and other names. Each of these divisions is further subdivided: "place names," for example, are further divided into names of continents and names of countries, administrative divisions, street names, names of natural terrain, names of constructions, names of small places and scenic spots, mail addresses, short and abbreviated place names, foreign place names, and place names of Chinese minority regions.

Part 2 is further divided into nouns, pronouns, numerals and measure words, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions, auxiliaries and exclamations, onomatopoeic terms, common expressions, idioms (chéngyǔ), and sayings.

The detailed topical divisions and subdivisions of the various kinds of terms is only one way that Yin seeks to help readers determine how to handle specific terms. Pages 10-38 present an alphabetically arranged index of the contents that can be accessed in various ways:

1. 1. Checking topically: for example, (a) looking up by checking "names of administrative divisions," not "place names; (b) looking up by checking "modifier-head nouns" or "míng + míng 2 + 2 modifier-head type"; and (c) looking up by checking "AABB type (reduplicated adjectives)," not "adjectives."

2. 2. Checking the prefixed part of a term: for example, looking up by checking fù.

3. 3. Checking the suffixed part of a term or the general part of a specialized term: for example, (a) looking up by checking shǒu, and (b) looking up by checking xiàn.

4. 4. Checking frequently used monosyllabic words or morphemes: for example, BU, SHI, ZHI, et cetera.

Helpful though many of Yin's lookup suggestions may be, they are often not easy for the average person to apply since many require a fair amount of linguistic sophistication and cultural knowledge. This is particularly true of those cases in which the same string of characters calls for different transcriptions depending on their specific use, for example chīfàn if used in Wǒ chī fàn, nǐ chī miàn, "I'm having rice, you're having noodles," versus Wǒmen bìxù shǒuxiàn jiějué qúnzhòng de chīfàn wèntí, "We must first solve the food problem of the masses" (p. 271). Another problematic area involves the distinction between "closely fused" and "loosely fused" two-syllable AB terms in which A and B have opposite meanings, for example hǎodài in Wànyì tā yǒu ge hǎodài zěnme bàn? "What shall we do if she happens to suffer a mishap?" versus Nǐ ya, fēnbuqīng hǎo-dài, "As for you, you can't tell the difference between right and wrong" (p. 292).

Yin notes that there are three categories of VO expressions in which V and O are monosyllables: (1) tightly joined, for example àiguó, "patriotic"; (2) separated/ joined, for example kāihuì, "hold a meeting"; and...