angling through dictionaries

The most recent rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers is Tiao-Fish through Chinese Dictionaries (4.3 MB PDF), by Michael Carr.

The tiáo < d’ieu < *d’iôg fish, a classical Chinese happiness metaphor, has been contradictorily identified as a chub, culter, dace, eel, goby, hairtail, hemiculter, loach, mullet, paddlefish, and pike. This paper illustrates the history of Chinese lexicography by comparing tiáo definitions from thirty-five Chinese monolingual dictionaries with tiáo translation equivalents from sixteen Japanese and seventeen Western language bilingual ones.

As Carr explains, “The tiáo fish provides a historical microcosm of Chinese lexicography because every principal dictionary defines it, and because *DZIOG‘s multifarious pronunciations and writings illustrate some unique linguistic problems in Chinese dictionaries.”

This was first published in September 1993 as issue no. 40 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

some tiao fish

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