The Bocabulario de la Lengua Sangleya por las Letraz de el A.B.C. (Manila, ca. 1617): Structure, contents, function

Hans-Jörg Döhla
Universität Tübingen

The Bocabulario de la Lengua Sangleya por las Letraz de el A.B.C. stands out among the Spanish missionary oeuvres dedicated to the documentation of the Chinese vernacular spoken by the Sangley community in Manila around the year 1600. As opposed to other vocabularies and dictionaries of the same epoch, it contains not only single line Hokkien-Spanish entries, but many additional pieces of linguistic and cultural information including example sentences selected and designed for conversational use during field work regarding proselytization. The Bocabulario is a complex text where several discourse layers can be distinguished, one traced back to the sources utilized by the compilers, another one implemented by the compilers themselves while following their didactic and practical goals, and a last one by the copyists who do not seem to have grown up with the European tradition of scripturality.

Publication history

Date received: 10 December 2024

Date accepted: 27 January 2025

Published online: 20 March 2025

Table of contents

This contribution is the first output within the scope of the project “Early Manila Hokkien (EMHo): Language, Missionary Linguistics and Migration from the perspective of the Bocabulario de lengua sangleya por las letraz de el A.B.C.” (henceforth Bocabulario). The project (2024–2027) is aimed at creating a digital online edition of the Bocabulario by uniting philological and linguistic expertises of Sinologists and Ibero-Romanists on the one hand and expert knowledge in digital humanities on the other. So far, the Bocabulario, the copy of a presumed original of ca. 1617, has received little scholarly attention (see Klöter 2011; Klöter & Döhla 2023; van der Loon 1967), an obvious gap, which will be filled in the upcoming years.

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