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On Language Log and in Sino-Platonic Papers, we have often focused on the rise of romanization for Sinitic languages, especially as engendered by the Jesuits and other Catholic orders.  In this post, I would like to introduce an Italian Ph.D. thesis that does a commendable job of surveying what transpired in this regard during the 16th through 18th centuries:

Emanuele Raini, "I Sistemi di Romanizzazione del Cinese Mandarino nei Secoli XVI-XVIII"

Sapienza – Università di Roma, Facoltà di Studi Orientali, Studi Asiatici, XXII ciclo, 2009/2010, published 2012

Abstract

The history of the Romanization systems created by European missionaries in late-Ming and early-Qing China to transcribe the Chinese pronunciation of their time is long and complex. Far from being simply composed by a series of cognate systems, it reflects the complexity of the multilinguistic environment in which were settled down the earliest Catholic missions in China. Also, from the observation of the various methods of Romanization, it is possible to appreciate the different degrees of linguistic sensibility of the many people directly involved in the invention, use or, sometimes, also in the "oblivion" of this or that method. After the arrival of the first European missionaries in the Philippines and Macao, different methods of transcription for the pronunciation of Chinese dialects have been developed and employed. Following the random romanizations used by different missionaries in their earliest accounts, as well as the massive use of a Portuguese-italian transcription made by Ruggieri-Ricci and their early confreres, the first (successful) attempt to impose a real standard for the Romanization of Mandarin based on Portuguese pronunciation was made by Ricci and Cattaneo in the early 1600’s, followed by a second experiment (failed) by Trigault in 1626, who tried to propose his own upgrade to the previous system. In the early 1650’s, other Jesuits of the Padroado employed systems descendant from that one of Ricci-Cattaneo. Martino Martini first used a Romanization system based on Portuguese, according to which he compiled the earliest known grammar of Mandarin, through which the rescued Ricci-Cattaneo system spread among the Company and the Intellectuals of Europe. Afterwards, and apparently very abruptly, Martini decided to move permanently to a slightly different system, actually more suitable to Spanish speakers, which reached a very wide audience through his historical and geographical works. In the same period, Boym employed a personal variant of the Ricci-Cattaneo Portuguese transcription, but his customization had only a small diffusion thanks to the extracts of his writings inserted by Kircher in his own works. Then it was the turn of a brand-new French standard of Romanization, first systematically employed by Bouvet, followed by Le Comte and other French-speaking missionaries and scholars. At the same time, Spanish-speaking missionaries strengthened the Spanish system of Romanization, especially through the linguistic works of Varo and the treatises by Navarrete. Some of the Italian-speaking missionaries of Propaganda, mainly active at the beginning of 1700, re-evaluated the role of Italian orthography in Romanizing Mandarin, even if it never achieved a wide-spread position among the other strands. After all, also some intellectuals and scholars like Mentzel, Muller, Hyde, Liebniz, Bayer, etc., who engaged themselves in the study of Mandarin from the second half of XVII century up to the whole XVIII century, also made experiments in developing their own systems, based on German or even English orthography. The huge amount of data concerning the Romanization of Chinese at its early stages can be arranged in several kinds of comparative charts and tables, to build up a general comparative framework which can be used as a friendly reference to investigate any kind of romanized material of that period.

From the Table of Contents (i-v), you can get a good idea of the rich assemblage of materials in this thesis.  Here, focusing only the main personalities involved, we may mention the following:  Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci and Lazzaro Cattaneo,  Nicolas Trigault, Juan Bautista de Morales and Francisco Diaz, Martino Martini, Michal Boym, Francisco Varo, and Basilio Brollo.  The dissertation concludes with a total four appendices on 59 pages and 17 pages of bibliography.

I.A. writes, "The impatient, like myself, turn first to the appendices at the end, which compare the various hands' initials and finals."

0.0 Introduction

For about fifty years, a useful teaching tool has been used in the study and teaching of Mandarin Chinese: Pinyin (拼音). Pinyin (literally, "combining the sounds") is the alphabet used for the phonetic transcription of Chinese pronunciation into Latin characters. This has contributed significantly to the literacy of the Chinese population and the spread of the national standard pronunciation (Pǔtōnghuà 普通话, literally, "common language"), as well as facilitating the learning of the language by foreigners. The current transcription system was planned and implemented at the political behest of the Chinese government; But in its original form, the phonetic transcription of the Chinese language arose precisely from the needs of some foreigners who lived in China centuries ago, forced to learn the language quickly to survive and carry out their activities.

Beginning in the late 16th century, European Catholic missionaries settled in China to establish new missions. Needing to quickly acquire the local language, they began using the Latin alphabet, in its various national pronunciations, to record the sounds of Chinese pronunciation. However, not all did so in the same way; some used Spanish pronunciation and orthography, others
Portuguese, others Italian or French, or, rather, borrowed individual spellings from different European alphabets, then combining them into mixed transcription systems, in order to best represent Chinese pronunciation. Since all these transcription systems used the Latin (or Roman) alphabet, the term "transcription" is often replaced by the quasi-synonym "romanization."

Over the next two centuries (17th-18th centuries), numerous attempts to transcribe the sounds of Chinese according to different systems followed one another, with varying degrees of success and diffusion. This was mostly the work of missionaries, but by extension, other varieties of transcription also arose among European intellectuals interested in the language of the Celestial Empire. Subsequently, in the 19th century (a period not covered by this thesis), with the arrival of Protestant missionaries in China, new transcription systems emerged, based mostly on English orthography, but which in fact laid the foundation on the attempts made in the previous two centuries.

The aforementioned romanization systems were used to varying degrees in the compilation of written documents, which represent the primary sources of this research. The typology of these documents is extremely heterogeneous: glossaries, phrase books, dictionaries, rhymes, grammars, letters, reports, historical works, transcriptions and translations of literary texts, catechisms, prayers, confessionaries, geographical and cartographic works, encyclopedic writings, etc. From these sources, it is possible to extrapolate data to reconstruct individual romanization systems, but the heterogeneity of the documents examined means that they do not all provide the same data. The method of data collection and arrangement, preliminary to the analysis, will be briefly illustrated in the first part of the thesis.

Through the study of the first systems of Chinese romanization, this research hopes to achieve three goals:

1) to outline part of the history of Chinese teaching in its embryonic period, coinciding with the dawn of Sinology;

2) to provide a database of ordered alphabetic data, useful for the phonological reconstruction of the pronunciation of Ming-Qing Mandarin;

3) to produce a framework for the interpretation, attribution, and, possibly, approximate dating of sources containing romanizations of Chinese words.

The first part of this thesis will briefly discuss the historical context that led European missionaries to the study of the Chinese language and its use in the production of textual documents. This will then introduce the primary sources examined and the theoretical and methodological assumptions preliminary to the collection and analysis of the data.

The second part will review the main romanization systems of the 16th-18th centuries, seeking to highlight similarities and differences, as well as any lines of evolution and diffusion of different traditions. The sources examined, although analyzed individually, will be presented within paragraphs dedicated to the author or authors who compiled them. This will allow us to chronologically place the birth and use of certain romanization systems, as well as highlight the possible use by the same author of different systems in different periods. Conversely, considering
the romanizations of individual sources divorced from their historical context and the personal histories of their users would lose essential reference for comparison purposes.

The third part will essentially consist of brief summary observations on the systems analyzed in the second part.

Finally, the appendices will present some data, organized according to various criteria,
in comparative tables that make them usable for various purposes, to provide a
synoptic overview of the salient characteristics of all the romanization systems
analyzed.

0.1 Current State of Research on the Topic

The linguistic materials produced by missionaries in China have attracted the attention of both the academic world in China and the West. Clearly, due to the fact that most of them were compiled in European languages, combined with the fact that a large number of these documents are still preserved in libraries and archives in Europe, their accessibility for Western academics is far greater than for Chinese scholars. Among the latter, the first to study romanization systems was the Chinese linguist Luo Changpei (1930), focusing on two works written in Chinese and printed in China, and therefore more readily available there than in Europe: Strange Examples of Western Writing (Xizi Qiji 西字奇迹, 1604, hereafter XZQJ) by Matteo Ricci and Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati (Xiru Ermu Zi 西儒耳目资, 1626, hereafter XREMZ) by Nicolas Trigault. Of the romanized works printed in China, these were among the first to appear, and the systems used in them set the standard for Jesuit romanization over the subsequent centuries. Luo (1930) reconstructs and compares the two systems of romanization, considering them valuable sources for reconstructing the pronunciation of the late Ming period.

The Italian sinologist and Jesuit Pasquale D'Elia studied an even earlier source, the Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary (Pu-Hua Cidian 葡华辞典, 1584, hereafter PHCD), a manuscript by Ruggieri and Ricci around 1584 (D'Elia, 1938). This highlighted the existence of an older romanization system, used by the two Italian Jesuits in their early years in China and therefore based on Italian orthography, unlike the romanizations used later by Ricci and Trigault, which were based on Portuguese orthography.

Subsequently, the Chinese-American Jesuit linguist and dialectologist Yang Fumian compared the three works (PHCD, XZQJ, XREMZ) already examined by the two previous scholars, paying particular attention to the phonological information deducible from the three romanization systems. Yang (1989) was the first to emphasize that the language variety described in the three works reflected a Southern pronunciation. His analysis of historical phonology, together with other evidence found in the missionaries' testimonies, led Yang (1989) to establish that the Mandarin used at the end of the Ming dynasty was based on the Nanjing dialect.

The Italian sinologist and linguist Federico Masini extended the comparative investigation
to other sources; in Masini (2003), there is a comparison of the romanization systems of the three works cited above (PHCD, XZQJ, XREMZ) with those found in three other works, respectively: the anonymous Dictionaire Chinois & Francois (in Kircher, Chine Illustreé, 1670; hereafter Dictionaire), the Grammatica Linguae Sinensis (ca. 1654; hereafter GLS) by the Jesuit Martino Martini, and, finally, the manuscript of the Vocabulario de Letra China con la Explicacion Castellana (ca. 1642; hereafter Vocabulario) attributed to the Dominican Francisco Diaz. In addition to the merit of having compared systems that covered a period of over 60 years, Masini's work contains some useful appendices with correspondence tables of initials, rhymes, and complete syllables.

American sinologist and phonologist Weldon South Coblin, primarily interested in phonological reconstruction, compared the romanizations in PHCD, XZQJ, and XREMZ with other alphabetic sources (Mongolian and Korean) from the Ming period (Coblin, 1997-2002). He then analyzed new missionary alphabetic sources, particularly the grammar Arte de la Lengua Mandarina (ca. 1683, publ. 1703; hereafter Arte) by the Dominican Francisco Varo (Coblin, 1998-2000), echoing Luo (1930) in emphasizing the importance of alphabetic sources in phonological reconstruction.

A more comprehensive study, similar in method and structure to the present thesis, has recently appeared, by sinologist and linguist Tan Huiying. In her in-depth analysis of Trigault's work XREMZ (Tan, 2008), she has included a substantial section dedicated to comparing Trigault's
romanization with most of the systems cited above (PHCD, XZQJ, Vocabulary, GLS, Arte), adding the romanizations of two other sources: the romanized transcription of the Xi'an Stele (in Kircher, 1667-70; hereafter Stele) attributed to the Jesuit Michael Boym and the work Innocentia Victrix (ca. 1669, published 1671; hereafter Innocentia) edited by the Jesuit Antonio de Gouvea. Tan's work is extremely useful, as it compares eight different systems, covering a time span of over a century (ca. 1584-1703). However, it suffers from the limitation of having relied primarily on secondary sources, thus reporting previously analyzed data without cross-referencing the original documents. Tan, moreover, is interested in analyzing the XREMZ in its various aspects,
therefore the summary of romanizations is necessarily an accessory, albeit well-structured, part of the work.

Taking into account existing studies on the subject, with particular reference to the main works listed above, this research attempts to further expand the number of sources (and therefore systems) to be compared, although limited to the first period of Western presence in Ming-Qing China (16th-18th centuries). Furthermore, the studies referred to, even the most extensive (Masini, Coblin, Tan), tend to consider only one source for each author, whereas in the present work, multiple sources for the same author are preferably considered, in order to better delineate the birth, evolution, diffusion, and use of the various systems.

[The English translations of the Italian portions of this post were done with the aid of GT and only slightly revised.]

 

Selected readings

• "Matteo Ricci and the introduction of the alphabet to China" (9/2/25)
• “Xizi Qiji 西字奇跡 (The Miracle of Western Words: Matteo Ricci’s Innovations in Language and Faith)", Sino-Platonic Papers, 363 (August, 2025)
• "Translating from Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic to Mandarin" (7/14/24)
• "The invention of an alphabet for the transcription of Chinese characters half a millennium ago" (11/21/22)
• "The past, present, and future of Sinography" (8/15/24) — especially Zhaofei Chen’s paper, which reveals the tremendous impact of the vernacularizing influence of Western missionaries during the late imperial period of Chinese history (from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries). Through translation, romanization, and their own writings, the missionaries contributed massively to the eventual demise of Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese as the official written language, at the hands of Modern Standard Mandarin.
• "The invention of an alphabet for the transcription of Chinese characters half a millennium ago" (11/21/22) — based on Takata Tokio's detailed codicological study of Matteo Ricci's Jesuit colleague, Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), Xīrú ěrmù zī 西儒耳目資 (An Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati)

October 30, 2025 @ 4:36 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language and religion, Romanization, Transcription

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