The Earliest Hokkien Maritime Vocabulary and Jargon Recorded in a Spanish-Chinese Dictionary of the 17th Century

The Earliest Hokkien Maritime Vocabulary and Jargon Recorded in a Spanish-Chinese Dictionary of the 17th Century

It has always been a difficult task to research and transcribe ancient seafarers’ terms pronounced in different regional dialects. Since 2015, the author has been trying to mark the Southern Hokkien (Minnan) dialect seafarers’ terms pronunciation using Chinese Pinyin, and to record them in Chinese characters, but had not able to find the final solution. In 2018, an oldest and largest extant Spanish-Chinese dictionary was discovered in the University of Santo Tomas Archives, this Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum is supposed to have been compiled in 1626-1642 for missionary purposes in Fujian by Spanish missionaries of the Dominican order with the assistance of Chio Chiu (Zhangzhou) people living in Manila. The dictionary has a total of over 1102 pages, containing about 21,000 entries, including single words, short sentences, idioms and slang. From left to right are Spanish entries, Southern Hokkien vernacular Chinese characters, Southern Hokkien dialect in Romanization, and Mandarin in Romanization. The dictionary not only contains a lot of seafarers’ terms, but more importantly, it also has enough single words to combine into the required new terms. This solves the problem of phonetic alphabet and Chinese character recording for Southern Hokkien dialect that has plagued us for many years. Instead of presenting a regional dialect seafarers’ glossary still very much in the making, this paper has focused on possible solutions for editing maritime vocabulary and jargon in different dialects, keeping the logics of nautical technology in mind. with a particular emphasis on the technical logic behind them. Appropriate selections from dialect dictionaries compiled by missionaries in the past may all contribute to the edition of a proper nautical technical vocabulary and seafarers’ glossary for the whole Chinese coastline.

Xu Lu

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology

November 2021

English

Lu, Xu. 2021. “The Earliest Hokkien Maritime Vocabulary and Jargon Recorded in a Spanish-Chinese Dictionary of
the 17th Century.” Edited by Brian Fahy, Hans Van Tilburg, Bill Jeffery, T. Kurt Knoerl, and Riley Smith. In
Proceedings of Fourth Asia Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage: Keelung,Taiwan, and
Virtual, November 1-5, 2021. The Museum of Underwater Archaeology URL: https://apconf-much.org/proceedings/exhibits/show/apconf-muchproceedings/item/674

Asia Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage