A Preliminary Analysis of the Romanization in the "Vocabulario da Letra China"

The Spanish Dominican friar is generally recognized as the author-compiler of a Chinese- Spanish dictionary, often referred to as Vocabulario de Letra China con la Explicacion Castellana. Francisco Diaz’s dictionary has been preserved up to the present in a certain number of copies; the one which can be considered the oldest extant copy, today preserved in Krakow, reveals a very complex structure in terms of stratification (emendation, augmentation, etc.) and it cannot be superficially considered an original. Some clues present in the Romanization and in the organization of the lemmas make us think to a somewhat direct connection between Trigault’s Xiru Ermu zi and the compilation of the Vocabulario; if this last hypothesis could be proved, Diaz’s work would represent another fundamental link in the historical chain of the Romanization of Chinese language.