Faculty Member Helps With Major Manchu-English Dictionary

February 25, 2013

Prof. Keith Dede was part of a team of people that assisted the late Jerry Norman (1936-2012) in the completion of his latest Manchu-English dictionary, A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary, published 2013 at the Harvard University Asia Center (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072138). The dictionary is a substantial revision of his 1978 dictionary, A Manchu-English Lexicon, which was the essential resource for a generation of Manchu scholars and historians of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) China. This new dictionary promises to be the primary tool for the next generation of scholars in those fields. As Mark C. Elliott, the Mark Schwarz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard University, writes in a preface to the new dictionary, this work, like “Nelson” and “Matthews”, will be known as the new “Norman”, in which “the author’s surname stands, immortally, for the work.”