Mark Elvin, a professor emeritus of Chinese history at Australian National University, is the author of The Pattern of the Chinese Past and The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.
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.
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