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PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
This little volume professes merely to be an expansion of Part VII. of Dr. C. C. Baldwin's excellent manual of the Foochow dialect. It is published in the belief that, with all its imperfections, it will supply a want and be serviceable to students of the dialect.
The Orthography of Dr. Baldwin's manual is adopted with but two points of exception: viz.
- The accentuated vowels ă & é of the manual are simple a & e in this dictionary; a & e following vowels are naturally pronounced short, and the imposition of special accent marks seems unnecessary.
- In this dictionary the letter h is substituted for the aspirate mark ʻ of the manual. The aspirated consonants chʻ, kʻ, pʻ, & tʻ of the manual are written chh, kh, ph, & th. This system is adopted in the Romanized dictionaries of the Amoy dialect, and recommends itself as aiding memory more effectively in distinguishing the aspirate initials. Slight confusion may at first be caused by the aspirated consonants ph & th. Phang is pronounced p-hang never as fang. The aspirated consonant ph is well illustrated in the Irishman's emphatic rendering of the name Pat. Thing is hing preceeded by the t sound and is never pronounced as in English.
For explanation of all other points of orthography, and for the significance of the tone marks, reference must be made to Dr. Baldwin's manual.
