“We were deeply impressed,” said Lee and Caño. Deeply impressive Facsimile edition of the dictionary published by the National Tsing-Hua University of Taiwan The Chinese dynasty lasted from the 14th century till 1644. They said an entry in DHS had a Spanish sentence as an example for the use of a term: “Tierra de Isla Hermosa ado estan los españoles”-“on the island of Hermosa, a land owned by the Spanish.” “Hermosa” is the Spanish equivalent of Formosa, Taiwan’s old name, which means “beautiful.”ĭHS likewise used a certain term that indicated the Ming dynasty was still existing when it was being edited. UST archivist and ecclesiastical historian Regalado Trota Jose linked the dictionary to the Spanish occupation of Taiwan between 16.įabio Yu-Chung Lee from National Tsing-Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan and José Luis Caño Ortigosa from the Universidad de Sevilla, who found DCS while researching at the UST Archives, agreed with Jose. The discovery is seen by scholars and cultural activists as helping counteract the Mandarin-only policy being enforced by the Chinese Communist Party, which critics call a form of cultural genocide directed against regional languages and communities such as the Cantonese in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.Ĭompiled and edited in the first half of the 1600s by Spanish Dominican missionaries in Manila, DHS is believed to be at least 70 years older than the Kangxi Dictionary, the standard Chinese dictionary ordered made by the emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynastly and first published in 1716. “istorians will find a wealth of information on the early history of the Spanish-Chinese encounter in the Philippines.” Cultural genocide He explained the dictionary is “the most comprehensive collection of Hokkien lexical items” of its time. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Henning Klotter of Humboldt University in Berlin. Ironically, the dictionary, cataloged in the UST Archives as “Vocabulario Espanol-Chino con caracteres chinos (Tomo 215),” was found with the label, “vale muy poco,” that is, “of little value” for contemporary use. In the Philippines, many Chinese speak “Fookien” or “Philippine Hokkien.” The 400-year-old “Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum” (DHS) provides not only the Chinese characters and Mandarin terms to Spanish words, but also their equivalent in Hokkien, the language spoken in Taiwan and Fujian province in southeastern China where many of today’s overseas Chinese came from. Spanish and Taiwanese scholars have discovered the world’s oldest extant and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Archives.
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