Western missionaries contributed largely to Chinese lexicography. Their involvement was basically a practical rather than a theoretical one. In order to preach and convert, it was necessary to speak Chinese. A missionary on post needed to learn at least two languages, the national Guanhua, the "language of the officials" or "Mandarin," and the local vernacular. The first lexicographical work by missionaries was a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary compiled in the late 1500s by Francisco Varo (1627-1687), a Spanish Dominican based in the province of Fujian, was legendary for his superb mastery in Mandarin. His Vocabulario de la Lengua Mandarina, a Spanish-Chinese dictionary, is made available to modern readers in the present study, which is based on two manuscripts held in Berlin and London. Volume 1 contains the text of Varo's glossary, with English translations offered for all Spanish glosses and Chinese characters added for all Chinese forms. Volume 2 includes a pinyin index to all Chinese forms in the text and a selective index to the English translations of the Chinese glosses. The Vocabulario is mainly devoted to the spoken language, but includes literary forms as well. Varo was also sensitive to other matters of usage, e.g., questions of style, new expressions coined by the missionaries, specific expressions in Chinese and in European culture, Chinese customs and beliefs, and aspects of grammar. The Vocabulario is recommended for readers interested in Chinese linguistics, lexicography, Sino-Western cultural relations and the history of Christianity in China.

Francisco Varo's Arte de la Lengua Mandarina, completed ca. 1680, is the earliest published grammar of any spoken form of Chinese and the fullest known description of the standard language of the seventeenth century. It establishes beyond doubt that this “Language of the Mandarins” was not Pekingese or Peking-based but had instead a Jiang-Huai or Nankingese-like phonology. It also provides important information about the nature and formation of pre-modern standard forms of Chinese and will lead to revisions of currently held views on Chinese koines and their relationship with regional speech forms and the received vernacular literature. Finally, it provides a wealth ot information on stylistic speech levels, honorific usage, and social customs of the elite during the early Qing period. The book provides a full translation of the 1703 text of the Arte, an extensive introduction to the life and work of Varo, an index of Chinese characters inserted into the translation, and an index of linguistic terms and concepts. It should be of interest to a diverse readership of Chinese historical, comparative, and descriptive linguists, students of Qing history and literature, historiographers of linguistics, and specialists in early Western religious and cultural contact with China.

Francisco Varo (1627-1687), a Spanish Dominican based in the province of Fujian, was legendary for his superb mastery in Mandarin. His Vocabulario de la Lengua Mandarina, a Spanish-Chinese dictionary, is made available to modern readers in the present study, which is based on two manuscripts held in Berlin and London.

An incisive, multi-faceted study of a Spanish-Chinese manuscript grammar of the seventeenth century, The Language of the Sangleys presents a fascinating, new chapter in the history of Chinese and general linguistics.

A collection of case-studies on Ritual and Performance spanning four continents, this book offers an insightful travel guide through a thick forest of approaches and methods in a field that has increasingly weighed on the research agenda in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics is written for those wanting to acquire comprehensive knowledge of China, the diaspora and the Sino-sphere communities through Chinese language. It examines how Chinese language is used in different contexts, and how the use of Chinese language affects culture, society, expression of self and persuasion of others; as well as how neurophysiological aspects of language disorder affect how we function and how the advance of technology changes the way the Chinese language is used and perceived. The Handbook concentrates on the cultural, societal and communicative characteristics of the Chinese language environment. Focusing on language use in action, in context and in vivo, this book intends to lay empirical grounds for collaboration and synergy among different fields.

From the 16th century onwards, Europeans encountered languages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia which were radically different from any of the languages of the Old World. Missionaries were in the forefront of this encounter: in order to speak to potential converts, they needed to learn local languages. A great wealth of missionary grammars survives from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are precious records of the languages they document, and all of them witness their authors' attempts to develop the methods of grammatical description with which they were familiar, to accommodate dramatically new linguistic features.This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. Its aim is to provide an integrated description, analysis and evaluation of the missionary grammars which were written in Portuguese. Between them, these grammars covered a huge range of languages: in Asia, Tamil, four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; in Brazil, Kipeá and Tupinambá; in Africa and the African diaspora, Kimbundu and Sena (from the modern Angola and Mozambique respectively).Each text is placed in its historical context, and its linguistic context is analyzed, with particular attention to orthography, the parts of speech system, morphology and syntax. Whenever possible, pedagogical features of the grammars are discussed, together with their treatment of language variation and pragmatics, and the evidence they provide for the missionaries' attitude towards the languages they studied.

Studies in Colloquial Chinese and Its History: Dialect and Text presents cutting-edge research into issues regarding prestige colloquial languages in China in their spoken forms and as well as their relationship to written forms and the colloquial literary language. These include the standard regional languages and prestige dialects of the past, the influence of historical forms of spoken Chinese on written Chinese, the history of guānhuà and the history of báihuà, proto-dialects and supra-regional common languages (koines), and their relationship to spoken dialects. The various studies in this collection focus on the dialect groups with the most substantial written tradition, including Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese, in north, central and eastern coastal, and southern China respectively. The contributors explore the histories of these dialects in their written and spoken forms, presenting a variegated view of the history and development of the regional forms, including their evolution and influence. This edited volume expands our understanding of the underlying factors in the formation of supra-regional common languages in China, and the written forms to which they gave rise. It broadens our understanding of the evolution of written and spoken forms of Chinese from a comparative perspective, revealing the interrelationships of various areal forms of Chinese and historical koines in China. “This is a rigorous and cohesive collection of articles important to our understanding of the development of the current modern varieties, and also to our understanding of the creation and interpretation of the texts themselves. Anyone interested in empirical work on Chinese dialects would find this of interest.” —Randy J. LaPolla (羅仁地), Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) “The history of Chinese dialects and Mandarin is a source of interest for many scholars. It is rare, however, to meet a collection that addresses the history and appearance of writing in such a detailed and unconventional way. This unique volume deepens our understanding and offers new insights into established scholarship. A highly recommended publication.” —Marinus van den Berg (范德博), Editor of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication (JAPC)

The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World is a collection of fourteen articles focusing on debates concerning the nature of “rites” raging in intellectual circles of Europe, Asia and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The controversy started in Jesuit Asian missions where the method of accommodation, based on translation of Christianity into Asian cultural idioms, created a distinction between civic and religious customs. Civic customs were defined as those that could be included into Christianity and permitted to the new converts. However, there was no universal consensus among the various actors in these controversies as to how to establish criteria for distinguishing civility from religion. The controversy had not been resolved, but opened the way to radical religious scepticism. Contributors are: Claudia Brosseder, Michela Catto, Gita Dharampal-Frick, Pierre Antoine Fabre, Ana Carolina Hosne, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Giuseppe Marcocci, Ovidiu Olar, Sabina Pavone, István Perczel, Nicholas Standaert, Margherita Trento, Guillermo Wilde and Ines G. Županov.