The Dictionarium Latino Nankinense and Nanjing Guanhua

Abstract

Adopting different points of view, this article analyzes a manuscript recently discovered in the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, the Dictionarium Latino Nankinense juxta Materiarum ordinem dispositum, handwritten by the French Jesuit missionary Benjamin Brueyre. It focuses in particular on the discovery’s potential importance for the study of Qing dynasty Nanjing Mandarin, while referencing its implications on the cross-cultural interactions between China and Europe. After an introduction presenting other fundamental texts compiled in Nanjing Mandarin by Western missionaries and scholars, the first section details the most commonly accepted grammatical theoretical framework for distinguishing Beijing Mandarin and Nanjing Mandarin. In the second section, the author presents the manuscript in detail, describing its purpose, its possible sources, and some of its linguistic peculiarities, particularly the lexicological, lexicographical, and grammatical features, as well as some illustrative examples of cross-cultural translations. Finally, in the third section, using the framework presented in the first, the author shows that the Dictionarium is a text mixing linguistic features from different varieties of Mandarin. As highlighted by the approach of missionary linguistics, the manuscript is a rare and important record of lexicological, lexicographical, grammatical, and romanization features of late Qing dynasty Chinese and deserves further research from both historical linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives.