Exploring Chinese compound words in the anonymous Breve compendio del vocabulario de compuestos en lengua mandarina and other Western missionary dictionaries

This article analyzes the anonymous and undated dictionary Breve compendio del vocabulario de compuestos en lengua mandarina, a work that was most likely written by a Dominican. The Dominicans not only compiled bilingual dictionaries translating from Spanish to Chinese but also from Chinese to Spanish. The dictionaries attributed to Francisco Díaz contain Chinese characters, with each lemma featuring a single character, arranged alphabetically according to the romanization of these characters. The lemmas often include examples in which these characters appear in combination with others. These polysyllabic examples were referred to at the time as complexos or compuestos. The Breve compendio, as the title indicates, is a dictionary aimed to include exclusively these so-called compuestos. This article is a first attempt to analyze these compuestos. What criteria did the author use to select these compuestos? What were his pedagogical-didactic intentions? Finally, we will compare a selection of lemmas with two versions of Francisco Díaz’s Vocabulario de letra China, and one version of Basilio Brollo’s Dictionarium Sinico-Latinum to gain a better understanding of the diffusion of knowledge in the field of Western bilingual lexicography in China.