via Philippine Inquirer, 08 February 021: The discovery of a 400-year-old Spanish-Chinese dictionary in the Philippines.
Spanish and Taiwanese scholars have discovered the world’s oldest extant and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Archives.
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.
In the Philippines, many Chinese speak “Fookien” or “Philippine Hokkien.”
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.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Henning Klotter of Humboldt University in Berlin. He explained the dictionary is “the most comprehensive collection of Hokkien lexical items” of its time. “[H]istorians will [also] find a wealth of information on the early history of the Spanish-Chinese encounter in the Philippines.”
Source: World’s oldest and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary found in UST | Inquirer Lifestyle
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