The ''Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

um'' (known in Vietnamese as ') is a trilingual Vietnamese- Portuguese-

dictionary written by the French Jesuit

lexicographer Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoretica ...

Alexandre de Rhodes Alexandre de Rhodes (15 March 1593 – 5 November 1660) was an Avignonese Jesuit missionary and lexicographer who had a lasting impact on Christianity in Vietnam. He wrote the '' Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum'', the first trilin ...

after 12 years in

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making it ...

. It was published by the ''

Propaganda Fide Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loa ...

'' in

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus ( legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

in 1651, upon Rhodes's visit to Europe, along with his catechism '.''Wörterbücher: Ein Internationales Handbuch Zur Lexikographie'' by Franz Josef Hausmann, p.258

/ref>

Background

Before Rhodes's work, traditional Vietnamese dictionaries used to show the correspondences between Chinese characters and Vietnamese ''

chữ Nôm Chữ Nôm (, ; ) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters (''Chữ Hán'') to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represen ...

'' script. From the 17th century, Western missionaries started to devise a

romanization Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, an ...

system to represent the Vietnamese language in order to facilitate the propagation of the

Christian faith Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global populati ...

, which culminated in the ''Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum'' of Alexandre de Rhodes. ''Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum'' was itself inspired by two earlier lost works: a Vietnamese–Portuguese dictionary by and a Portuguese–Vietnamese dictionary by António Barbosa.

Content

The dictionary has 8,000 Vietnamese entries with glosses in Portuguese and Latin. The publication also incorporates a summary on Vietnamese grammar (''Linguae Annamiticae seu Tunchinensis Brevis Declaratio'') and codification of some contemporary pronunciations.

Impact

The dictionary established '' chữ Quốc ngữ'', the Vietnamese alphabet, which was refined by later missionaries and eventually became the predominant writing system for Vietnamese.''Wörterbücher: Ein Internationales Handbuch Zur Lexikographie'' by Franz Josef Hausmann, p.258

/ref> Mgr Pigneau de Béhaine contributed to these improvements with his 1783 Annamite–Latin dictionary, the manuscript of which was remitted to Mgr

Jean-Louis Taberd Jean-Louis Taberd (1794–1840) was a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and titular bishop of Isauropolis, '' in partibus infidelium''. Career Born in Saint-Étienne, Jean-Louis Taberd was ordained priest in Lyon in 1817 ...

who published in 1838 his Vietnamese–Latin / Latin–Vietnamese dictionary. Despite these efforts, Christian publications in Vietnam continued to use either Latin or the traditional Vietnamese

rather than the simpler alphabetic Quốc ngữ for the next 200 years, and Quốc ngữ would only gain predominance with the French invasion of 1861 and the establishment of

French Indochina French Indochina (previously spelled as French Indo-China),; vi, Đông Dương thuộc Pháp, , lit. 'East Ocean under French Control; km, ឥណ្ឌូចិនបារាំង, ; th, อินโดจีนฝรั่งเศส, ...

.''Vietnamese tradition on trial, 1920–1945'' By David G. Marr, p.14

/ref>

Notes

References

External links