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“... 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. The subdialects spoken in the northern part of China have long been a mosaic of vernaculars that are more or less mutually comprehensible, but only very more or less ...”