Ricerc@Sapienza

The work presented is the analysis, study, translation into and from Chinese of a late Qing China lexicographical previously unpublished work, a catechism published in Latin with the transcription of Chinese pronunciation. Starting from the transcription, the author provided the whole text in Chinese, annotated the text, translated the preface and pointed out its sources.
The text represents a unique instrument for all scholars interested in the topic of Nanjing guanhua, the history of foreign missions in China, linguistic missionary and the cultural interactions in the late Qing.

The work presented is the analysis, study, translation into and from Chinese of a late Qing China lexicographical previously unpublished text; a Latin-Chinese dictionary. The author has reconstructed the phonetical annotation, the Chinese characters as annotated by the original author and the Latin entries; the author has also annotated the texts, translating the prefaces and pointing out its sources.

In this article, I briefly describe and analyse the lexicographical contribution to the history of the Chinese language provided by different foreign scholars of late Qing China. The article focuses on the classification and description of classifiers expressed in some lexicographical works, specifically grammatical and miscellaneous texts edited between the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

The article analyzes the compilation of bilingual dictionaries, in particular Chinese-foreign language dictionaries, focusing in the second chapter on those created by Robert Morrison (Ma Lixun ???, 1782-1834) and Karl Ernst Georg Hemeling (He Meiling ???, 1878-1925). The third chapter then is centred on the description of Chinese language within the Chinese-foreign language dictionaries of the 19th century, as well as of the equivalence of concepts and words. The following two chapters are finally devoted to the works by Kuang Qizhao ??? (1836-after 1899?) and Yan Fu ?? (1854-1921).