The title ABC Dictionary might indicate that this is a book for beginners, but it is in fact a very specialised academic work of value to advanced researchers into sixth to eighth century Japanese language use. A more accurate description would be a concordance of ancient Sino-Japanese character use. As such, it is a major work of scholarship but unfortunately, its arrangement means its content is only easily accessible to experts.
The dictionary covers the 1,215 characters used in the earliest Japanese texts. Each entry contains the character, its Old Japanese reading (in an unusual Romanisation, see below), a range of different period Chinese readings plus Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Korean readings followed by examples of use. The examples come not only from ancient texts but also from recently excavated bamboo or wooden tablets (mokkan). One aim of the dictionary is to provide “a substantial amount of state-of-the-art information regarding reconstructed languages of East Asia as well as putting important Sino-Xenic information in one easy to find place”. The appended 30-page chart of all the phonograms, showing which of 12 sources each appears in, is an important aspect of the book in this regard.
The ABC referred to is a recently developed form of Romanisation designed specifically for Old Japanese called Frellesvig Whitman. The choice is justified, thus “to make this dictionary as accessible to as many specialists and non-specialists as possible, it was felt that a Romanisation system that was highly accurate and yet not idiosyncratic in spellings would be the best to use”. The logic of this approach is debatable, but it should not create an insuperable problem, as it will be recognisable to users of more standard forms, and no doubt there are online systems for translating between systems.
However, the more fundamental problem is that there is no index which allows ready access to the information if the reader does not know how the character is pronounced. A non-specialist user would expect there to be a stroke count index, which is the traditional method of identifying the pronunciation of a Chinese character. Admittedly, many online dictionaries now exist such that if you highlight a character, its pronunciation is provided, but other volumes in this series do provide stroke count indices. Confusingly, the conventions section of this book states that “a character finding index at the rear of the dictionary will alert the reader to a kanji with multiple readings”. This is misleading as the only additional entry route provided is for Pinyin pronunciation. When clarifying the nature of the indices with the publisher, I was directed to the fact that an incorrect version of this Pinyin index had been printed and the correct version was available to download on the University of Hawai’i press website.
This book is a meticulously researched work which will be of great interest to a small number of scholars, but it could have been produced in a format which would make the scholarship accessible to more users. So librarians without specialist knowledge should check with the academics they serve before purchasing this volume.
