Thesaurus Linguae Sericae.

From the About TLS section (I’ve collapsed the one-sentence paragraphs because they annoy me):

TLS explores the conceptual schemes of pre-Buddhist Chinese on the basis of a corpus of translated texts interlinked with an analytic dictionary. Text and dictionary are constantly held up against one another. Our understanding of the texts and the Chinese system of meanings can be refined by through this close confrontation. TLS associates Chinese concepts with concepts from the European antiquity, aiming to make the classical Chinese evidence comparable to that of other cultures. TLS seeks to make more precise the criteria used in translating classical Chinese, through a detailed description of the semantic relations that obtain among Chinese words.

TLS is the first synonym dictionary of classical Chinese in any Western language; it attempts to state as clearly as possible the semantic nuances that distinguish words close in meaning. TLS is the first dictionary which systematically organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic and mereonomic hierarchies, thus exploring the topology of the Chinese mental space. TLS is the first dictionary that systematically registers lexical relations like antonym, converse, epithet, etc., thereby aiming to define the Chinese conceptual space as a relational space. TLS is the first dictionary of Chinese which incorporates detailed syntactic analysis, thus enabling the systematic study of basic phenomena as e.g. the history of abstract nouns in China. TLS is the first corpus-based dictionary which records the history of rhetorical devices in texts, making it possible to study crucial matters such as the history of irony in China.

I guess most people who would be interested already know about it, since it’s been around for a while, but you never know. Lukas Zadrapa, in Word-Class Flexibility in Classical Chinese: Verbal and Adverbial Uses of Nouns (Brill, 2011), calls it “the most extensive and definitely the most sophisticated interactive encyclopedia of (primarily ancient and mediaeval) Chinese language and Chinese concepts at hand, which I have had the chance to exploit since the time almost ten years ago when it was not even remotely accessible via the internet” (pp. 12-13). Kudos to General Editor Christoph Harbsmeier, who apparently got it started, and a tip o’ the Languagehat hat to Trevor for the link.

Comments

  1. TLS is the first synonym dictionary of classical Chinese in any Western language; it attempts to state as clearly as possible the semantic nuances that distinguish words close in meaning. TLS is the first dictionary which systematically organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic and mereonomic hierarchies, thus exploring the topology of the Chinese mental space.

    How I dearly wish that kind of dictionary existed in any language I have studied, including English.

  2. What annoys me is the repetitive ‘TLS is the first dictionary …’ — even with the small variations. Personally I’d have preferred ‘TLS is the first dictionary that:’ and then bullet points.

    But it looks like a fantastic resource!

  3. dictionary which systematically organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic and mereonomic hierarchies … How I dearly wish that kind of dictionary existed in any language I have studied, including English

    If you’ll settle for rhizomal connections, instead of mere tree-shaped ones, then the OED is what you’re looking for.

  4. There are books of synonym discriminations in English, though they tend to be heavily prescriptive and naturally rather limited in scope. The Merriam-Webster (Concise) Dictionary of English Usage has many synonym discriminations, and also (very usefully) indications of which prepositions are used with which verbs, and in what meanings.

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