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oa Interpreting and Understanding the Cochinchinese Characters: From the Perspective of Europeans in the Early 19th Century
- Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Asian Studies, The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12), Jun 2022, Volume 1, p.381 - 388
- ISBN: 9789048557820
Abstract
This article discusses a rarely discussed manuscript dictionary A Vocabulary of the Cochinchinese Language compiled by Italian missionary Joseph Morrone and published by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and aims to interpret and discover the understanding of the Cochinchinese characters and their relations with written Chinese characters from the perspective of European missionaries and linguists in the early 19th century. Through analyzing and examining the Cochinchinese entries in the dictionary, Du Ponceau was greatly inspired to challenge the axiom about the term “ideographical” which became the roots of Sinological debate (the Boogberg-Creel controversy) and aroused the “Critique of the Ideographican Myth”.
© The Authors. Published by Amsterdam University Press. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)