Wise Words

• The Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary edited by Wu Jingrong
  Commercial Press (Peking and Hong Kong)/Pitman, 976 pp, £12.00, November 1979, ISBN 0 273 08454 2

This is a dictionary of a language that does not yet quite exist. If this seems a paradoxical way to talk of standard modern Chinese, the paradox is easily enough resolved by a brief account of its origins. Let us, for the sake of simplicity, take the spoken and the written languages separately.