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VERY well-known among scholars in the Chinese Linguistics world, Professor W. South Coblin has already published, with the collaboration of Joseph A. Levi, the Francisco Varo’s Grammar of the Mandarin Language (1703): An English Translation of “Arte de la Lengua Mandarina” (Philadephia, John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2000, 280 pp.). This is just to indicate the importance attached to the academic contributions of Francisco Varo (1627-1687), a Spanish Dominican and missionary in China for 38 years. The bulky work in two volumes under review is a thorough examination and presentation to the English speaking academe of the Vocabulario de la Lengua Mandarina compiled in not even two years” time (1677-20th May 1679) as an expansion of an earlier “Glossary of Mandarin” composed in 1670 by Francisco Varo, at that time based in 福寜 Funing (福建 Fukien).
Although China has nourished one of the longest and very specific lexicographic traditions in the world, most of the produced dictionaries have dealt mainly with the written aspect of the language. After some foreigners were admitted to stay and live in China—that is: Western missionaries in the sixteenth century—only then bi-lingual lexicons taking into account the spoken aspects of the studied various languages in China began to flourish. Francisco Varo’s work has its deserved place among others not necessarily better known.
Professor South Coblin is to be congratulated for salvaging from oblivion Varo’s Vocabulario and for giving to his work the solid basis of four extant documents, that is: two Spanish-Chinese manuscripts, one in the German State Library of Berlin and the other in the British Library in London; a Portuguese-Chinese closely related manuscript in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome; and finally, kept in the “Archives des Missions Étrangères de Paris”, a Spanish-Chinese document which has a preface to the Vocabulario which explains the structure, the purpose and the conventions of the text and is translated in English for this new edition. Obviously, Varo had it in mind to help beginners in the study of the language spoken by the officials of his time—hence the name given to this “medium”, the 官話 guanhua or Mandarin. But he stresses:
“It should be noted that neither in all places, nor [among] all speakers [of a particular place] is the Mandarin language spoken perfectly, but rather they mix in many words and pronunciations of the native language of their own area, which [language] they call hiang tán [郷談]. For which reason it is not good to emend the pronunciations which are written here in favor of what such [local speakers] say (unless they be natives of the city or metropolitan area of Nánking [南京]), because all of them [i.e. the pronunciations recorded here] are taken from the Chinese dictionaries according to the way they are pronounced in Nánking.” (Vol. 1, p. 17)
These remarks were pedagogically oriented, yet they have historical importance as far as the evolution of guanhua or Mandarin Chinese is concerned. This explains also that Varo could base his romanization transcription of the language to that already devised by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and improved sometime later by Nicolas Trigault for his 西儒耳目資 Xi Ru Er Mu Zi, that is “an aid for the ears and eyes of Western scholars” (we would now say: an “audio-visual” aid), published in 杭州 Hangzhou in 1626. Varo added some minimal modifications to fit the needs of Spanish-speaking missionaries. As present day Mandarin is now closer to the language spoken in Beijing, it is fortunate that Varo’s romanizations of the Chinese entries are given after the modern romanization in the Pinyin Index of Volume 2. Comparative studies of both schemes will be of interest to the linguist historians of the Chinese language.
The text of Varo’s glossary, given in Volume 1, contains all Spanish entries followed by their glosses, the English translations of these and Varo’s romanization of the corresponding Chinese characters. One might regret that the alphabetical order of the Spanish entries is occasionally not fully coherent. Volume 2 includes the above mentioned pinyin index to all Chinese terms and expressions in the text and a selective index to the entries of English translations of the Chinese glosses, both with references in Volume 1 to the pages of the Berlin most complete (228 pages) manuscript of the Vocabulario.
Although mainly devoted to the spoken language, the Vocabulario includes nevertheless some literary terms and sayings. Varo’s expertise in Mandarin is evident in his attention to grammatical explanations, usage, style, levels of speech, expressions needed in pastoral ministry, specific cultural turns of phrases, both in their Chinese or European backgrounds, and of course social customs and religious beliefs.
The abundant and various tenets of spoken Mandarin at the time carry with them new insights into Sino-Western cultural relations and the spread of Christianity in China. But this new thorough edition of the Vocabulario will mainly be a precious tool given to specialists for their research in Chinese historical linguistics and lexicography.
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Yves Camus has supervised (1985-1998) the up-dated compilation of a Chinese-French dictionary, the Grand Dictionnaire Ricci de la Langue Chinoise in 7 volumes (300,000 entries, Paris, 2002). One of the Founding Members of the Institute, he has taken part in the conception and development of its Research and Cultural activities, especially as Associate Director and now Editor of this Chinese-English quarterly journal, launched in January 2004. He has recently been appointed Research Fellow of the Institute. His main fields of studies and interests are Chinese philosophical and spiritual traditions in modernity. |
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| Issue 6.3 |
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Remembering—
A Shared Duty
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