Chinese Character Dictionary: A New Approach to Arranging, Explaining and Looking Up Chinese Characters by Adrian van Amstel (review)

Adrian van Amstel's Chinese Character Dictionary (CCD) represents a very different approach to organizing Chinese characters in a non-electronic paper-based dictionary. Describing himself in the Preface to his dictionary as a "visual learner", Van Amstel adopts a visual strategy whereby similar looking characters are grouped together. Rather than organizing characters according to their Pinyin or stroke count, Van Amstel's CCD adopts a look-up method based on the premise that when radicals are stripped away what remains is "the main and most prominent part of the character" (Preface), or what Van Amstel refers to as the "phonetic" part.

Three hundred ninety-five phonetic parts have been designated as "series headers", each heading a "character table". These 395 character tables accommodate around 7,450 traditional and 1,450 simplified characters. The 395 character tables and their corresponding series headers are further categorized into 17 main components – the Main Components Table (MCT) – based on their shape, ten of which are identified as having slanting strokes, and the remaining seven with mostly horizontal and vertical strokes. For example, one category includes components with strokes that slant to the right, another to the left, another with strokes slanting in both directions. The rationale for Van Amstel's assignments to these categories is not always clear. For example, in his review of Van Amstel's CCD, Zhang (2016, 104) questions grouping 月, 周, 丹 with those components with horizontal and vertical strokes rather than with strokes slanting to the left.

Though clearly influenced by T. K. Ann's Cracking the Chinese Puzzle by Conceptualizing and Philosophizing Approach¹, Van Amstel faults Ann's "four-corner indices method" as "cumbersome", and notes how "finding a particular character in the dictionary part was far from straightforward" (Preface). Though clearly hoping to improve on Ann's work, Van Amstel's method for organizing and locating characters falls prey to similar criticisms as he levels against Ann. While Van Amstel's work is not without scholarly merit, the CCD offers anything but "a quick method for locating characters", as claimed in the Introduction (p.12).

I will illustrate how one locates characters in the CCD with two examples: 糧 (liáng) and 咪 (mī), both of which include the component 米 (mǐ). On the one hand, the CCD considers the component 米 (mǐ) in 咪 (mī) as a "phonetic" part, thus contributing to the phonetic similarity between these two characters, whereas 米 (mǐ) in 糧 (liáng) is regarded as a "positional radical" contributing semantically to 糧 (liáng) which means 'grain'. Unlike common radicals, a positional radical is only recognized as a radical when it occurs in a certain position in a compound character, whether to the left, right, or top or bottom. Further guidelines, though acknowledged to be "not entirely foolproof" (p.28), are provided for identifying certain "special bottom radicals". Since 米 (mǐ) in 糧 (liáng) is a positional radical – specifically a "left radical", it is stripped away, leaving more horizontal-like components. As we scan down the representatives of each of the last seven categories in the Main Components Table (see figure 1) – where the horizontal and vertical components are located – we find a likely lead in Category 14 (see figure 2). Targets under discussion are highlighted with rounded rectangles in the figures for expository convenience throughout the text.

Figure 1.

The Main Components Table in the CCD (p.46-47)

Figure 2.

Category 14 in the Main Components Table in the CCD (p.47)

Turning to page 458, we come to the Section 14 Series Headers Table (see figure 3), and locate the series header corresponding to 糧 (liáng) (see figure 4).

Figure 3.

Section 14 Series Headers Table in the CCD (pp.458–459)