GUIGNES, Joseph de

Dictionnaire chinois, français et latin

Paris, 1813.

ギーニュ『中・仏・羅事典』

　The Dictionnaire chinois, français et latin was compiled on Napoleon’s orders by Joseph de Guignes (1759-1845), the French consul in Canton and son of a sinologist. It began to be printed by the Imprimerie impériale around the end of 1809, and was completed and published in 1813.
　Napoleon’s coronation as emperor in 1804 ushered in the publication of large numbers of books that contributed to the advancement of science and culture. In 1808, Guignes was appointed to compile a dictionary of Chinese needed for Catholic missionary work in China, and he was given three years in which to do so. He set about his task using the Dictionnaire chinois-latin (1726), a dictionary of Chinese produced by Étienne Fourmont (1683-1745) and kept in the imperial library that arranged characters by tone.
　This arrangement made it hard for anyone to use unless they already understood Chinese. Guignes, however arranged the haracters by number of strokes, making it possible for his dictionary to be used without knowing the meanings of the characters. The dictionary gives the pronunciation and French and Latin meanings of 13,316 Chinese words, which are arranged under 214 radicals in order of number of strokes (from 1 to 17). To make it easier to look up Chinese characters, the dictionary also provides total stroke count and radical indexes, and the same arrangement is used in Japanese dictionaries of Chinese characters.
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