Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy
Carstairs Douglas and Thomas Barclay
Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1990. First published 1873, revised 1923.
ISBN: 957-9482-32-2
Language: English/Taiwanese (POJ)
Format: Hardback
Overview
The Reverend Carstairs Douglas (1830-1877) was a Scottish missionary from Renfrewshire who spent twenty-two years with the English Presbyterian Church living among the people of Ē-mn̂g (Amoy, known as Xiàmén in Mandarin) in Fujian Province, China.
His dictionary was a product of this long stay and sought to address a lack, at that time, of any dictionary of spoken Southern Min in English. Some of the entries give a fascinating insight into the times in which Douglas lived, while many others remain useful to this day.
Just four years after his dictionary went to press (in London as Fujian had no sufficient facilities at the time), Rev. Douglas succumbed to a cholera epidemic in his adopted home of Ē-mn̂g at the age of forty-six.
Fifty years after first being published, a Chinese character index was added by the Rev. Thomas Barclay, of Tâi-lâm, who also made revisions and updates to the main dictionary. Although by Barclay's time the Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization system was already standardised, he chose to retain Douglas' slightly esoteric version of that system.
