Chinese European Dictionaries: Lexicographical Manuscripts for the Historical Study of Exchanges between China and Europe (end of 16th -beginning of 19th centuries)) – ChEDiL

The project brings together around twenty participants, since we have opted for a collective and multidisciplinary approach. This was made necessary by the complexity of the documents and their conservation; these factors also partly explain why critical re-editions of old dictionaries rare and specialized studies are few. On one hand, dictionaries are complex documents that are difficult for a single researcher to master, due to the multiple skills required to study them; this is further compounded by the impressive size of these documents. On the other hand, some dictionaries have links, more or less close, with earlier ones, but the fact that they are kept in different libraries, sometimes in uncatalogued collections, makes it difficult to carry out comparative study of the originals. The collaboration of researchers trained in different fields of history and linguistics, as well as specialists in artificial intelligence and digital humanities, was a necessary choice to handle all the issues outlined above.
The study of the contents in dematerialised and digitised form (which requires the collection of digital versions of the dictionaries from the beginning of the project,) will be combined with the analysis of the originals, since the codicology of these hybrid works needs to be developed. The volumes must be studied comparatively and partially transcribed, either manually or using HTR. This IT processing must adapt to the complexity of the dictionary, with tabular and multi-script content, sometimes with supplements featuring particular page-layouts. As these dictionaries can be seen as the result of interactions between Western and Chinese lexicographical traditions, they will be studied at the level of macrostructure (e.g. the choice of Chinese characters for entries, the layout of lemmas) as well as at the level of microstructure (e.g. entries containing quotations, or inspired by identified sources), all analysed diachronically in the context of the history of missionary linguistics. The different systems used to transcribe sounds into Latin letters will also be studied, providing substantial contributions to the history of phonology and to diachronic phonology.
On the basis of the elements gathered in the database developed for this purpose, and the complementary material specific to each discipline, the researchers involved in the project will also carry out joint historical studies on their respective sub-fields and specific themes (history of knowledge, of technology, of botany, history of religions and missions, etc...). This common foundation will then enable researchers to develop more detailed and specific work that will feed into teaching, conference papers and publications.

Outputs: database and website, research publications, teaching, critical editions.
ChEDiL will develop an open-access database and a website to facilitate comparisons between the different manuscripts scattered across libraries and allow cross-search on metadata, as well as on the content of dictionary entries. By using web standards to describe such information, the ontology and thesaurus developed will serve as milestones for further studies in related fields; all the programs developed to extract and process data will be made on an open-source basis, and shared through GitLab so as to be of use to other projects requiring assisted transcriptions of different scripts, and concerning dictionaries or other tabulated documents. In parallel, the researchers will elaborate critical editions of at least three Chinese-European manuscript dictionaries, and collective volumes related to the international conferences organized during the project: two colloquia (one on linguistic ; the other on terminology, conceptual history and history of religion and missions); workshops on cultural history and circulation of knowledge, codicological peculiarities and artificial intelligence and digital humanities. Many researchers involved in the project are currently teaching; seminars related to the ChEDiL project will be proposed to students, to concretely make possible the perpetuation of research in the field.

This exploratory study, based on the collaboration of researchers from various fields, is a first step towards a multidisciplinary study of dictionaries as linguistic objects. It could be extended to other periods (up to the end of the imperial era in particular) and/or to other types of sources/supports. It could thus be extended to the study of multilingual tools after 1830, when foreigners finally entered the territory of the Qing empire, or of terminologies of Western origin which arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when Western printing techniques led to a new form of reproduction and distribution, but also other formats for dictionaries—which, in the context of our project, are all manuscripts. Opening up to other geographical areas is also a possibility; some of these areas are well known in interregional studies of East Asia, for example all the countries that use or have used Chinese characters; others can be explained by the geopolitics of the modern or colonial period, as well as by the presence of missions of different orders, for example in India or in the Philippines, who share the same linguistic tools (or not).
ChEDiL is also in line with other French projects currently being launched for the application of HTR to Asian languages, especially to Chinese; issues specific to the multilingual and tabular nature of the documents will have to be solved: all these different research projects are potentially intended to merge into common projects, for the treatment of foreign, rare or ancient languages via HTR, regardless of the characteristics of the original supports.

In progress

This project stands at the crossroads of cultural history, the history of linguistics, and digital humanities. It will focus on a corpus of Chinese-European dictionaries (end of the 16th c. - beginning of the 19th c.), preserved in manuscript form. First compiled by missionaries, often in collaboration with Chinese who remained anonymous, and later owned by scholars in Europe, they played an essential role in the circulation of knowledge between China and Europe, and represent the first steps in the construction of European sinology. The corpus will be studied not only as linguistic data, but also as objects of ongoing globalization and as complex artefacts in which different cultures concretely meet. As these dictionaries are scattered in different countries’ institutions, a preliminary task is to compile a repertory, while analyzing their materiality and collecting information about their circulation, which will feed monographic or key studies. The dictionaries will also be studied as linguistic and pedagogical tools, providing new insights on both the history of linguistics and language learning. Furthermore, dictionary entries will be investigated as sources of information on cultural history, intellectual history, political history, the circulation of knowledge between China and Europe, and the history of the missions. The project also involves the construction of a database, obtained by manuscript digitization, OCR, computer-assisted transcription, and manual transcription. This open-access database will be designed as a searchable archive, destined to serve as a reference tool for researchers. The members of the project will investigate this voluminous, varied, and under-studied manuscript corpus from different perspectives, producing monographic studies in their fields of expertise and collaborating on the elaboration of critical editions of the most important manuscript dictionaries.