A Dictionary of the Amoy Vernacular

A Dictionary of the Amoy Vernacular William Campbell

Tainan: Presbyterian Church of Taiwan Press, 2006 (originally published in 1913).

ISBN: 957-8959-92-3

Language: Taiwanese (POJ)

Format: Hardback

Cover price: NT$600

Overview

A Taiwanese-only dictionary, the entries consist of alphabetical phonemes in POJ with their written equivalents in Chinese characters and the reading pronunciation of the same character (if known). Some of the characters Campbell assigns to certain sounds are dubious, but it remains a great work in Southern Min lexicography, forming the basis for many later works by both Eastern and Western scholars.

In the example shown below right, characters which have identical colloquial and reading pronunciations have an initial capital letter An excerpt from the dictionary(the first two entries in the image are examples of this). Morphemes which exist only in the colloquial have a lower-case initial letter and no corresponding character (like the fourth and fifth entries in the example). Those which have a differing pronunciation for the colloquial and reading versions display the vernacular term first, followed by the literary form in parenthesis.