Basilio Brollo’s dictionarium sinico-latinum (Chinese-Latin dictionary) : A critical edition of the manuscript Rinuccini 22 (biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) / Gabriele Tola, Preface by Federico Masini and Paolo De Troia

John Benjamins [Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 134]

Available online through

John Benjamin's Publishing Company

This publication is the first critical edition of the Dictionarium sinico-latinum (Chinese-Latin dictionary) by the Franciscan missionary Basilio Brollo (1648–1704; Chinese name, Ye Zunxiao 葉尊孝). This publication thoroughly researches for the first time a lexicographical milestone, copied and plagiarised for centuries as a fundamental linguistic instrument. It is aimed not only at scholars of missionary linguistics, lexicography, and lexicology, but also represents an essential reference for researchers of cultural interaction between Europe and China, and of conceptual history.
Based on the edition stored in Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, known as “Rinuccini 22” (1694), this volume opens with a variety of research articles on different linguistic, historical, and cultural aspects of the Dictionarium (see the table of contents below), followed by the transcription of the whole dictionary, including Chinese characters and their variants, romanisations, Latin definitions, examples, and Chinese glosses.

At the same time, the database https://chindictionary.lad-sapienza.it is launched.
Based on the Dictionarium sinico-latinum, this relational database has been developed to digitise and organise the data coherently. The proposed structure provides a solid foundation for indexing and querying through a search engine capable of navigating both the information explicitly present in the Dictionarium sinico-latinum and other ancient sources and the information that can be implicitly inferred. This approach ensures high flexibility and broad applicability: it allows for the generation of grammatical indexes that can be easily applied to a wide range of written sources and can be progressively enriched to include new graphic variants, pronunciations, or meanings. The database allows research on the whole text of the Dictionarium sinico-latinum with a variety of modalities.

John Fryer and the translator's vade-mecum : new perspectives on the history of modern Chinese scientific and technical lexicon / by Gabriele Tola.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

"In John Fryer and The Translator's Vade-mecum, Tola offers for the first time a comprehensive study of the collection of scientific and technical glossaries, with English-Chinese parallel translation, compiled by the English scholar John Fryer (1839-1928). Other than contributing to the history of modern Chinese lexicon and translation in late Qing China, Tola analyses the role of The Translator's Vade-mecum in the diffusion of ideas and terms between China and the West, at the same time providing new insights on the connection between religious efforts by missionaries in late Qing China and their secular attitude towards translation. The great number of resources presented also show a new perspective on the transcultural flows of knowledge, China's modernisation process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of nineteenth-century Protestant missions in China"-- Provided by publisher.

"HCEA 4"--On Spine.

Winner of the Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology 2023

Analysis of: The Translator's Vade-mecum, a collection of vocabularies of Chinese terms used in the translation of scientific books at the Kiangnan Imperial Government Arsenal, Shanghai, China / compiled by John Fryer and published in 1888 in Shanghai by the Presbyterian Mission Press.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-377)
Local access dig.pdf. [Tola-John Fryer.pdf. N.B. Restricted access until 2020

"Mapping the world through lexicography : a preliminary study on toponyms in Brollo’s 'Dictionarium sinico-latinum'" / Erica Cecchetti and Gabriele Tola

Published in Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 51, Issue 1-3, 2024 

Also available through Boston College Libraries

Abstract:

This article analyses the original contribution of the Franciscan missionary Basilio Brollo (Ye Zunxiao 葉尊孝 or Ye Zongxian 葉宗賢, Gemona, 1648–Xi’an, 1704) to the description of Chinese toponyms and geographically relevant terms included in his Dictionarium sinico-latinum (1694, 1699), regarded as one of the most noteworthy earliest dictionaries compiled by foreign missionaries in China. The article first provides an overview of the list of toponyms included in the dictionary, describing their Chinese, romanised, and Latin renditions. Secondly, it compares selected terms with the corresponding toponymic occurrences in the Chinese sources Brollo used as references when compiling the manuscript. The article concludes with a discussion of the lexicographical and lexicological efforts involved in this process, as well as the intercultural dialogue involved in them, highlighting Brollo’s personal and original contribution to the description of 17th-century Chinese geographical elements, with special reference to the terms related to the Chinese geographical regions where he lived and worked.