From Martini to Prémare: Early analytic Descriptions of Mandarin Chinese in Latin

ome of the earliest works to describe Mandarin Chinese from the 17th century onward were written in Latin, which was the standard language of the learned people of the time in Europe. For this reason, Latin was immediately associated with the language spoken by the Mandarins: guanhua 官话, or Mandarin Chinese. Not only was Latin used as the metalanguage in these texts, but the grammatical categories of the Graeco-Latin tradition were borrowed as well in order to analyse, explain, teach, and learn a language that was actually very different from any of those spoken in Europe. This paper, after a brief introduction to the oldest Mandarin grammars written in Latin – namely the Grammatica Linguae Sinensis of Martino Martini (compiled around 1653–1656 and published in 1696), and the Notitia Linguae Sinicae of Joseph Henri de Prémare (compiled in 1720 and published in 1831) – will analyse how the description of Chinese evolved in the 70 years in between, how Chinese lexical and grammatical categories were rendered in Latin and how or how much the Latin categories were kept, stretched or adapted in order to define or explain linguistic phenomena that were not present in any of the native languages of the European missionary learners (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc.) while using terminology that would be familiar to them.