The Chinese language and the West before Christianity reached China

The encounter between Christianity and the Chinese language largely coincided with the history of the Western world in China. The Christian faith arrived in China during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368). Before this period, there was very little information about China in the ancient Western world, and even less information about the Roman Empire in China. In the scant information about China in early Latin sources, there is no specific reference to the Chinese language; however, the Chinese term for 絲 sī ‘silk’ entered Latin as sericum and in Greek as sērikón (σηρικός). Eventually, the term was borrowed by other European languages to indicate not only silk but also the Seres (i.e. the population that produced such precious fabric, the Chinese). In Chinese texts, the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries ad was first indicated as大秦 dà qìn, but no reference to Western languages can be found earlier than the 13th century in Chinese sources. In works compiled during the Song Dynasty by Zhao Rukuo 趙汝适 (1170–1231), 諸蕃志 Zhūfán Zhì (Records of Foreign People), it was recorded that in Sicily (斯加里野 Sījiālǐyě), the language was similar to that of 蘆眉 Lúméi, which can be interpreted as Rome (Fracasso 1982).

The first real encounter between the Chinese language and Christianity took place during the Yuan Dynasty, when scores of missionaries and merchants, mostly Italians, reached China. The Pope in Rome, who was in search of allies to fight against Islam, was the first to suggest a journey to China. In the few documents written in Latin by early visitors from the West, such as the most well-known Western account of those journeys, The Travels of Marco Polo, there was some information about the Chinese language:

For you must know that throughout all Manzi [i.e. China] they employ one speech and one kind of writing only, but yet there are local differences of dialect, as you might say of Genoese, Milanese, Florentines, and Neapolitans, who though they speak different dialects can understand one another.

Early Christianity in China

The early presence of a Christian community is attested by the well-known Nestorian Stele, or 大秦景教流行中國碑 Dàqín Jǐngjiào Liúxíng Zhōngguó Bēi (Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin), discovered during the late-Ming Dynasty in the city of Xi’an 西安. The stele was erected in 781AD to celebrate the presence of a Nestorian community in the area. Although many scholars have questioned its authenticity, the stele is now considered the earliest source of Chinese knowledge of Western faith. It includes the first Chinese rendering of some words of Western origin, mostly proper names created by phonetic loans, such as 娑殫 Suōdān ‘Satan’, or words related to Christian doctrines, such as 我三一 wǒ sān yī ‘our trinity’ (Havret 1902: 28, 15).

However, the first real interaction between the Chinese language and foreign languages from the West took place in the last decades of the 16th century, when Western vessels reached the South China Sea following the commercial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. To support such a vast commercial expansion, which took place following the discovery of America in 1492, a great missionary campaign was launched to spread the Christian faith among the indigenous populations of all the continents. The missionaries reached the Far East, including Japan and the Philippines, in the second half of the 16th century and established one of their bases in Macao, which was administered by the Portuguese Empire beginning in 1557. The first extant descriptions of the Chinese language ever written in any Western language can be found in the writings of the first Portuguese and Spanish missionaries, who had the opportunity to acquire some knowledge of the local language.

Early Chinese dictionaries and grammar books by Westerners

With the progress of missionary activity, during the 17th century, a large number of Chinese dictionaries and a few grammar books were compiled. The Spanish Dominican Francisco Diaz (1606–1646) wrote Vocabulario de Letra China con la Explicacion Castellana (Vocabulary of Chinese Letters with Castilian Explanations) in 1642 (Masini 2003; Ishizaki 石崎博 2005; Raini 2010). The dictionary, one of the first of its kind, included over 7,000 entries in Chinese characters, listed according to their Romanization, from the syllables ‘Ça’ to ‘Xun’. Each entry included the meaning of the word in Castilian, plus some (mostly disyllabic) compounds and sample sentences exclusively in transcription. The Romanization was of Portuguese derivation (e.g. the nasal ending – m for /ŋ/), although with some inconsistencies due to the influence of the Spanish system; for example, the nasal ending – m, typical of Portuguese systems, coexisted with the Spanish – ng for the nasal /ŋ/ (Raini 2010). This kind of dictionary was an absolute novelty in the history of Chinese lexicography and it was considered the prototype of monolingual and bilingual modern Chinese dictionaries.

This work was followed by the most important manuscript of Francisco Varo: Vocabulario de la Lengua Mandarina (Vocabulary of the Mandarin Language), recently republished and studied in great detail by Coblin (2006). This Chinese dictionary was phonetically arranged, with no Chinese characters. The Romanization was of Spanish derivation and it was highly coherent. Varo was also the author of the Chinese grammar book Arte de la lengua Mandarina, compiled in 1682 and published in Canton in 1703 by Pedro de la Piñuela, which was studied and edited by Breitenbach (2000) and Coblin (Coblin 2000; Coblin and Levi 2000). This grammar book was preceded by Grammatica Sinica, or Grammatica Linguae Sinensis, compiled by the Jesuit Martino Martini (1614–1661) between 1651 and 1653 and revised in 1656. Martini’s Grammatica Sinica is considered the earliest extant Mandarin grammatical text; it was also published in the 1696 edition of Melchisédec Thévenot’s collection of travel reports, Relations de divers voyages curieux (Bertuccioli 1998, 2003; Paternicò 2013). This text was widely circulated in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, contributing enormously to the diffusion of Chinese language knowledge in European intellectual circles.

These grammar books were the first attempt to present Mandarin Chinese grammatical features according to the European grammatical tradition. For example, Martini’s grammar book divided the subject according to the following Classical Latin categories: nouns, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, adverbs, interjections, conjunctions, numbers and their particles. This classification was the prototype of the modern classification of the Chinese parts of speech. In some cases, this was even the first case of the classification of specific grammatical peculiarities of Chinese, like classifiers, which were first identified by Chinese scholars in 1924 as 量词 liàngcí following Masini’s grammar system (2008). These grammatical peculiarities were listed and analyzed in great detail in most Chinese grammar books and dictionaries edited by Westerners from the 17th century onward (Masini 2008). One great achievement of European lexicography at such an early stage was the Dictionarium Sinico-Latinum (漢字西譯 or Hànzì Xīyì), of which over 20 manuscripts have been identified in several countries, demonstrating its importance. The dictionary was compiled in Nanjing 南京 in 1694 by the Italian Franciscan Basilio Brollo (1648–1704). Like previous dictionaries, it included thousands of Chinese characters arranged according to the radicals, with Latin translations, compounds and sample sentences. The appendices included several lists, such as classifiers, with their related nouns, antonyms, lexical units beginning with the character 打 dǎ, etc. Brollo was also the author of a second dictionary completed in 1699, arranged according to phonetics, that included over 9,000 characters (Masini 2005; Raini 2010; Bussotti 2015).

When Emperor Napoleon I ordered the publication of a Chinese dictionary, the former French Consul in Guangzhou 广州, Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes (1759–1845), published a luxury edition of Brollo’s first dictionary under his own name, with the title Dictionnaire chinois-français et latin, in Paris in 1813. De Guignes translated into French only the first meaning of each entry, leaving in Latin the compounds and sample sentences (Landry-Deron 2015). This event was the result of a great argument among European proto-Sinologists over the primacy of the publication of a Chinese dictionary in Europe. De Guignes’s publication occurred only two years before Robert Morrison (1782–1834), the founder of the Protestant mission in China, published his Dictionary of the Chinese Language (Macao: East India Company’s Press), the first Chinese-English dictionary ever (Dong 2011). Thus, it is possible to see how a line of continuity existed between the linguistic production of the early Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan missionaries, who had compiled many Chinese dictionaries and grammar books and the new generation of American and English missionaries who arrived in China at the beginning of the 19th century, following the military and commercial expansion of the British Empire (Masini 馬西尼 2001).

Russian Orthodox Chinese linguistics

After the death of Matteo Ricci (1610), the so-called Chinese Rites Controversy began. The Jesuits proposed an accommodation policy that would allow Chinese converts to take part in Confucian seasonal rites, while other Christian orders, such as the Dominicans and Franciscans, were strongly against any form of adaptation to local culture. The dispute lasted for over a century until, 1721, when the Jesuits were forced to leave China. During the early decades of the 18th century, the Orthodox Church opened a permanent mission in Beijing, thus establishing a direct channel of communication between Europe and China. Undoubtedly, the Jesuits also contributed to the birth of Russian Sinology, for example, providing information on the Chinese language to Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738), the German professor who worked at Saint Petersburg’s Academy of Sciences and published Museum Sinicum in 1730, one of the first books on the Chinese language published in Europe (Lundbæk 1986).

The Treaty of Kyakhta (1727) between the Russian and Qing empires raised the issue of the lack of interpreters. Therefore, a few priests were regularly dispatched to the mission in Beijing to learn the language. Some of them compiled original language primers, lexical and grammatical materials on Chinese and Manchu (Kozha 2016). One of the first students was Illarion Rossokhin (1715–1751), who prepared the first Russian-Chinese vocabulary book in 1744 along with a language primer. Anton Vladykin (1761–1811) compiled the Manchu Grammar in 1798 and the Manchu-Chinese-Russian Lexicon in 1808 (Popova 2016). The most outstanding Russian scholar of the period was Hyacinth Nikita Bichurin (1777–1853), who published the Kitajskaja grammatika, the first Chinese grammar book in Russian, in 1835. The book included a comprehensive comparative table of the various Romanization systems (French, Portuguese, English and Cyrillic). Bichurin, in the preface to the volume, adopted a comparative method and analyzed eight Chinese grammar books previously published by Europeans, such as Varo’s Arte de la lengua Mandarina in China; Bayer’s Museum Sinicum in Russia; Fourmont, Abel-Rémusat and Prémare’s (1847[2007]) grammar books in France; Alfonso Gonçalves’s Arte China in Macao; and Joshua Marshman’s Elements of Chinese Grammar in Serampore. This was considered one of the most outstanding works in Chinese linguistics compiled by early Russian scholars. As for dictionaries, Archimandrite Palladius (1817–1878), who was stationed in the Beijing mission for more than 30 years, compiled the Chinese-Russian Dictionary, which was published posthumously in 1888. Palladius’s Cyrillic Romanization of Chinese is still regarded as the standard today (Liu 柳若梅 2010, 2016; Popova 2016).

Mandarin Chinese-English dictionaries by Protestant missionaries

The attitude of Protestant missionaries in their missionary activity was very different from the one adopted earlier by Christian missionaries. For missionary strategy reasons, the first missionaries tried to spread the Christian faith among upper-class Chinese literati so that it would then spread among the common people. Therefore, they devoted their efforts to learning what was considered the literary written language, 文言 wényán and the colloquial lingua franca, which they first called Mandarin, or Guānhuà. The Protestant missionaries, on the contrary, who were mostly Britons and Americans, had a more practical attitude, and they immediately decided to work on two fronts: learning the official written language and, at the same time, studying the dialects spoken by local people in the regions where they dwelled, first Guangdong 广东, then Fujian 福建 and eventually the area of Shanghai 上海, following the developments of the commercial activities of the Westerners in China after the first Opium War (1839–1842).

Two years after the plagiarized publication of Brollo’s dictionary in Paris by de Guignes, Morrison published the first Chinese-English Dictionary in three parts: (I) Chinese-English arranged according to radicals; (II) English-Chinese arranged according to Romanization; and (III) English-Chinese. This was an absolute novelty that laid the groundwork for the development of modern Chinese bilingual dictionaries in terms of lexical entries and content arrangement (Yong and Peng 2008). Morrison acknowledged a line of continuity with previous dictionaries, since he had widely used the manuscript dictionaries of the “Romish Church” (Morrison 1815b: ix–x), probably referring to Brollo’s dictionary. Morrison greatly enriched the content of each entry by inserting a large quantity of sample sentences from his practical experience, in Romanization and in Chinese characters, which were missing in previous manuscript dictionaries. The Romanization included finals in – ng and the indication of aspiration through an apostrophe placed after the consonant (although not consistently). This system lasted for over a century, until it was replaced by modern pinyin, which used voiced consonants for non-aspiration and voiceless consonants for aspiration. Morrison’s dictionary had no consistent indication of tones, although the author referred to them in the introduction. It is interesting to note that Morrison’s dictionary and many other early lexical works prepared by Protestant missionaries paid less attention to the consistency of the phonological description of the Chinese language than previous materials prepared by Catholic missionaries. On the other hand, the description of the meaning of the characters and compound words was more detailed in Morrison’s and in later Protestant missionaries’ dictionaries than in any other previous manuscripts. We can speculate that the Catholic missionaries dealt with a more consistent language variety spoken by the upper class in Nanjing and eventually in Beijing, while the Protestant missionaries faced a great diversity of spoken Chinese local languages and therefore, preferred to be accurate in the description of Chinese characters. Another reason for this choice could be that, at that time, it was quite difficult to reproduce aspiration marks and tone signs in printed materials. Therefore, Protestant dictionaries may have appeared less accurate in terms of phonological descriptions.

Morrison arranged the first volume according to the 康熙字典 Kāngxī Zìdiǎn, translating a great amount of the over 40,000 characters in that dictionary, an impressive increase of entries when compared with the less than 10,000 entries in Brollo’s dictionary. He then arranged the second volume according to the Romanization of Nanjing 南京官话 Guānhuà, instead of that of Beijing, following the 五车韵府 Wǔchē Yùnfù, a late-Ming rhyme book, since he found it impossible to arrange the Kāngxī Zìdiǎn’s entries according to their sound. This dictionary was followed by the Chinese-English Dictionary by Walter Henry Medhurst (Batavia 1842–1843), arranged according to the radicals and by the English and Chinese Dictionary in Two Volumes in 1847 and 1848, which were mostly revised and abridged versions of Morrison’s dictionary. In the line of continuity, it is interesting to note that Medhurst as well, in the introduction to his dictionary, mentioned having consulted some anonymous Latin-Chinese dictionaries, most likely those prepared by Catholic missionaries in the earlier centuries. A new breakthrough was the publication of A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy and Shanghai or the Hàn-Yīng Yùnfǔ 漢英韻府 by Samuel Wells Williams in 1874. He not only took into consideration different phonological systems, an interesting goal but very difficult to achieve (Yong and Peng 2008: 387), but also adopted disyllabic words as his main reference for lexical entries under a single character head. His tones were noted in a very uncommon way, with a semicircle written on one of the four corners of the character. He was also very consistent in the precise indication of aspiration, using an apostrophe to mark it. These three dictionaries paved the way for the birth of an autochthon modern tradition of bilingual lexicology (Yang 杨慧玲 2012; Huang et al. 2016). As a matter of fact, the first dictionary completely edited by a Chinese person was the 字典集成 Zìdiǎn Jíchéng by Kuang Qizhao (or Kwong Ki Chiu 鄺其照), first published in Hong Kong in 1868, in which he acknowledged his obligation to Morrison, Medhurst and Williams’ dictionaries (Takata 高田時雄 2009).

Chinese bilingual dialect dictionaries by Protestant missionaries

Together with the development of Mandarin Chinese dictionaries, as already mentioned, the Protestants engaged in the study of various local languages, preparing linguistic tools to learn them. If the mainstream of lexical materials on Mandarin Chinese proved to be crucial for the development of a genuine tradition in modern bilingual dictionaries, the materials on various dialects eventually became the main source for modern scholars to describe the developments of those local languages, in terms of their phonology and lexical and grammatical peculiarities. According to different bibliographical works (Wylie 1867[1967]; You 游汝杰 2002; Shen 沈国威 2011), during the 19th century, the Protestant missionaries edited almost 50 Chinese bilingual dictionaries, of which eight featured different Fujian dialects, five covered Cantonese, two highlighted the Shanghai dialect and one focussed on Ningbo, not to mention the over 150 missionary texts of various dialects written in Romanization. Some of the earliest of these dictionaries included Morrison’s A Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828), Medhurst’s A Dictionary of the Hok-Keen Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms (1832) and Joseph Edkins’ A Vocabulary of Shanghai Dialect (1869). Many other works followed. All of these materials have recently attracted the attention of Chinese scholars, who have published innovative studies on the evolution of such dialects in terms of their phonology and lexicon (Ni 倪海曙 1992; Heylen 2001; You 游汝杰 2002).

Chinese grammar books and language primers

Following the earliest Chinese grammar books prepared by Catholic missionaries, during the 19th century, over 30 grammar books were published, the first being Elements of Chinese Grammar 中国言法 Zhōngguó Yánfǎ, published by Joshua Marshman in Serampore in 1814, followed by Morrison’s A Grammar of the Chinese Language 通用漢言之法 Tōngyòng Hànyán Zhī Fǎ, also published in Serampore, in 1815 (Morrison 1815a; Uchida 內田慶市 2010a, 2010b). It is worth noting that, as for the dictionaries, the Protestants followed the path of previous grammar books, in particular Varo’s Arte de la lengua Mandarina, which opened the way for the publication of Chinese grammar books in different countries, such as those by Abel-Rémusat (1822), M. A. Bazin (1856) and S. Julien (1869) in France and H. N. Bichurin (1835) in Russia. All of these texts, and the many published in China, greatly contributed to the learning of the Chinese language by foreigners. They were also considered precious materials from which to understand the linguistic situation of China during that period. Finally, they paved the way for the compilation of autochthonous descriptions of Chinese grammar, of which Ma Jianzhong’s 马建忠 马氏文通 Mǎshǐ Wéntōng (1898) is considered the first example.

It is difficult to single out the very first language primers of the Chinese language prepared by missionaries; however, some very early materials in manuscript form have been analyzed recently (Breitenbach 2000: xl–xlii; Raini 2010: 102–112). Lazarist Afonso Gonçalves prepared, in Macao, some innovative materials to teach Chinese as a foreign language (Levi 2007); some teachers from the Collegio de’Cinesi in Naples published materials for learning Chinese (Castorina 佳美琳 2016); and the Protestants prepared several texts for beginners in Cantonese and in Mandarin, such as Williams’ Easy Lessons in Chinese (Cantonese) published in Macao in 1842, Thomas Devan’s The Beginner’s First Book in the Chinese Language (Canton Vernacular) published in Hong Kong in 1847 and many others. However, the most important work was T. Wade’s Yü-yen Tzu-erh Chi语言自尔集 (A Progressive Course Designed to Assist the Student of Colloquial Chinese) published in London in 1867, which was regarded as a milestone in the history of manuals for the study of Chinese by foreigners.

As already mentioned, the early phonological descriptions of Mandarin Chinese attracted the attention of Chinese scholars, beginning with Luo Changpei (1930, 1934), who began to reconstruct the phonological features of late-Ming/early-Qing Mandarin Chinese. This reconstruction during the 1990s eventually gave rise to a debate among linguists about the origin of modern Mandarin pronunciation based on Beijing sounds. In particular, these studies proved that the sound system of the late-Ming/early-Qing dynasties, which were found in Catholic missionary sources, was based on Mandarin Chinese, while during the 19th century, the standard pronunciation eventually shifted from Nanjing to Beijing Mandarin Chinese. The Yü-yen Tzu-erh Chi by Wade was used as a later source to detect when, how and why this shift from Nanjing to Beijing took place during the 19th century (Coblin 1997).

New words for new ideas

The presence of Western Christians in China also raised the problem of how to render Chinese ideas that were alien to the local culture. As discussed before, as early as the Xi’an Stele, some concepts of the Christian religion were translated into Chinese through phonetic loans and loan translations. While studying Chinese, the first Jesuit missionaries faced the problem of how to render in Chinese ideas and names of realities previously unknown to the Chinese. Thus, they began to create neologisms through phonetic loans, loan translations and semantic loans. The first problem was how to render the name of God: Ruggieri and Ricci first adopted 上帝 Shàngdì or 天 Tiān as semantic loans but eventually preferred the new creation 天主 Tiānzhǔ, which is still in use. Later, the first two terms were prohibited on the grounds that they pre-existed in Chinese and therefore were considered not suitable for the Christian God. The divergence on the usage of such terms was ultimately the bulk of the so-called Chinese Rites Controversy between the Jesuits and Dominicans, which ultimately led to the end of the Jesuits’ experience in China at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Eventually, in the 19th century, the term 上帝 Shàngdì was, on the contrary, preferred by the Protestants. The translation of religious terms, and specifically the Chinese rendering of the Bible’s New and Old Testaments, led to a long-lasting querelle about every single specifically religious word (Zetzsche 1999).

The Jesuits also created scores of neologisms that are still in use in Chinese, such as the loan translations 熱帶 rèdài ‘torrid zone’, 冷帶 léngdài ‘frigid zone’, 溫帶 wēndài ‘temperate zone’ and 地球 dìqiú ‘terrestrial globe’ and semantic loans such as 赤道 chìdào ‘equator’. The contribution of the Protestant missionaries to Chinese lexicons was even bigger, having developed the enormous activity of publishing Chinese books on many different subjects and, therefore, the need to create new words. Many of these terms are still in use, such as the loan translations 鐵道 tiédào ‘railway’ and 民主 mínzhǔ ‘democracy’ and semantic loans 新聞 xīnwén ‘news’ and 權 quán ‘right’. Many of these terms eventually reached Japan and Korea, which contributed to the development of lexicons in their languages, for example, the loan translation 新聞紙 xīnwénzhǐ, lost in Chinese but still in use in Japanese (Masini 1996; Shen 沈国威 2010).

Conclusion

The presence of Christianity in China, from a very early stage until the end of the 19th century, not only had a great impact on the development of modern tools to study the language by foreigners but also paved the way for a mature Romanization system of Chinese (in Latin letters and in Cyrillic) for the development of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and for the consistent and scientific description of grammatical features of standard Mandarin, as well as of a great variety of Chinese dialects.