| Summary: | The main objective of this article is to briefly illustrate the contribution of Italian sinology in compiling dictionaries of the Chinese language. Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci succeed in compiling a list of words by means of a new transcription method which will be later improved and adopted by many Europeans. Basilio Brollo compiled a dictionary which was very popular in 18th century Europe and was the first Chinese one ever published. Two other missionaries worked for years on a dictionary: Carlo Castorano and Joseph Pruggmayr. Their works can be considered the earliest Italian-Chinese dictionaries but they haven’t been studied in detail so far. The last section, dealing with the 19th century, list in brief, all the failed attempts to print a bilingual dictionary in Italy.
|
|---|