We know that the earliest practical English dictionary was Johnson's Dictionary, which was born in 1755 and contains more than 40,000 words. Before it, in 1604, there was a dictionary of words with only 2,500 words, which had not yet been paraphrased. So, since the birth of the Johnson's Dictionary, it has been the standard of meaning and the use of French in English until 150 years later, when it was replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary.
It can be seen from Wang Zheng's "Diagram of Strange Weapons" that in 1628, the Western alphabet was still in the initial stage, and it only had 20 letters, which was not only very different from the so-called letters now, but also had a huge difference in pronunciation. But by the 19th century, the English alphabet was no different from what it is now, except for the difference in pronunciation.
I've been trying to find Johnson's Dictionary and have a look, but I've been unable to do so. Until one day, I found a 19th-century reprint in the Library of Congress. The figures I have given here are two editions of Johnson's Dictionary, one from the 1810 edition, with 286 pages;The other edition is from 1844 and has 1,192 pages (it is supposed to be merged with another dictionary). However, neither of these dictionaries has a modern phonetic alphabet, and I don't recognize the words in them. If you think you are good at learning English, you can recognize it and see how many words you can recognize
In addition, I have given a copy of the English-Chinese Dictionary, which was created by Wh.The dictionary written by Medhurst, dated 1865, was hand-copied by Keiyu Nakamura. From the content of this "English-Chinese Dictionary", it can be seen that many of its words were created based on the Chinese language, such as "abacus, shitai, antang, abbot, dantian, viscera, tubo, unburied first, wormwood, laxative medicine, zen, mystic, cassia son, hanlin scholar, joy of meaning, ben and mo, heshun, teller, wende, only fate is listening, master book, xin, seeing the scene and love, drama, huadan, incompatible, ten take it."
First, it is said that it is said, it is said that it is a word of persuasion, three bows and nine kowtows, worship the sky, in the next, the future, out of the list, the nest of the bird, the generation, the longevity, the agricultural affairs, the sigh of sorrow, the algorithm, the hundred officials, the garlic, the loyalty, the loyal ministers are not two hearts, the omnipresent, the hu, the Tongrentang, but I am alone, the scrivener, the scrivener, the parade, the three yuan, the origin of the Shuo, the ancestor, the temple, the Kuixing, the clouds and rain, the fishing man, the spirit, the loss of blood, the star anise, the historical records, the Antarctica, the order, the Gangji, the letter people, the six arts, the Zhongju people" and so on.
From this, we can know that Westerners must have the fact that "English words are constructed according to Chinese characters". First, from the 17th century, there were only a few thousand English words, and by the time of the Johnson Dictionary, the number had increased to more than 40,000, and the Kangxi Dictionary, which was a few decades earlier, had more than 40,000 Chinese characters. It is rumored that "Johnson's Dictionary" has the possibility of referring to "Kangxi Dictionary", which is not unreasonable. Because it is very difficult to create new words and interpret their meanings, from nothing to something. Because there are some words that you can't think of without seeing or touching them. For example, "Zen" and "Zhihu are also", can Westerners think of it without a teacher?Second, there are not many Chinese characters in China, but the number of words, idioms, proverbs, and afterwords composed of Chinese characters is surprisingly large. As can be seen from the explosion in the number of Johnson's Dictionaries over the past few decades, it must have borrowed a large number of Chinese words. Third, the vocabulary of this edition of the English-Chinese Dictionary is also illustrative.
In short, Western English was only discovered in the past few hundred years, so the so-called Western scientific works one or two thousand years ago can be considered to be the "masterpieces" of Westerners' lies.