Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum
Encyclopedia
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
-Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
-Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
written by the French Jesuit lexicographer Alexandre de Rhodes after 12 years in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
, and published by the Propaganda Fide
Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples
The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples in Rome is the congregation of the Roman Curia responsible for missionary work and related activities...
in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
in 1651 upon Rhodes' visit to Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
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Before Rhodes's work, traditional Vietnamese dictionaries used to show the correspondences between Chinese characters and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm script. From the 17th century, Western missionaries started to devise a romanization
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
system to represent the Vietnamese language in order to facilitate the propagation of the Christian faith, which resulted in the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum of Alexander de Rhodes. The dictionary has 8,000 Vietnamese entries with translations in Portuguese and Latin.
The dictionary established Quốc ngữ, the Vietnamese alphabet, which was perfected by later missionaries and is still in general use today. Mgr Pigneau de Béhaine
Pigneau de Behaine
Pierre Joseph Georges Pigneau , commonly known as Pigneau de Béhaine, also Pierre Pigneaux and Bá Đa Lộc , was a French Catholic priest best known for his role in assisting Nguyễn Ánh to establish the Nguyễn Dynasty in Vietnam after the Tây Sơn...
contributed to these improvements with his 1783 Annamite–Latin dictionary, the manuscript of which was remitted to Mgr Jean-Louis Taberd
Jean-Louis Taberd
Jean-Louis Taberd was a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and Bishop of Isauropolis, in partibus infidelium.-Career:...
who published in 1838 his Vietnamese–Latin / Latin–Vietnamese dictionary.
In reality, however, Christian publication in Vietnam continued to use either Latin or the traditional Vietnamese Chữ Nôm 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
French Indochina was part of the French colonial empire in southeast Asia. A federation of the three Vietnamese regions, Tonkin , Annam , and Cochinchina , as well as Cambodia, was formed in 1887....
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