Loan words in Chinese and linguistic diversity in Dictionary Portuguese-Chinese (1583-1588)

When reviewing the history of cultural communication between Europe and China, it can be generally said that European missionaries served as cultural and linguistic ambassadors in China since the 15th century. During their evangelical mission they had to master the Chinese in a short time in the face of many difficulties, during which cultural and linguistic gaps between languages could not be ignored. In order to connect the languages, they developed some effective methodologies applying them to bi-lingual dictionaries editing. These practices have partially influenced each other in ways of word-building and lexical categories. The Dictionary Portuguese-Chinese edited from 1583-1588 by Italian missionaries Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci is the object of my research, which aims to investigate how new-word-building methods (especially loan words in Chinese) were applied and how Chinese diversity represented in this bi-lingual dictionary. In my presentation, all examples are analyzed as an integrated system in perspective of lexicography, since dictionaries could be utilized as data carriers but also information transmitters. Other methodologies such as comparative linguistics (feature-by-feature comparison) are used as well, and the comparison is restricted to the lexicon. Referring to study of this Dictionary there have already been published papers and articles focusing on phonology, orthography and lexicology. However, only a few of them put emphasis on its lexicographical value. A few of them just mentioned some fragmented concepts related to Chinese diversity (oral or written language, Mandarin or dialects, etc) but lack in theoretical integration. Therefore, the structure of this presentation will be organized as follows: clarifying lexical selection criteria while editing, analyzing some specific loan words in Chinese of the Dictionary and then illustrating their later development. It is expected that this paper can offer more textual data and inspire further research in the field of bi-lingual lexicography.