Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and Vietnamese dictionaries
From Connected (2/4/22), a publication of the Peabody Essex Museum:
"Phillips Library digitizes dictionaries from Vietnam and unlocks stories of museum founders and their travels", by Kathlene Baldanza
The blog post is accompanied by beautiful images of pages from the dictionaries. Here are the first three paragraphs:
Two recently digitized manuscript dictionaries in the Phillips Library collection are once again sparking conversation. In 1819, John White, a lieutenant in the US Navy, received dictionaries from an Italian Catholic priest named Joseph Morrone in Saigon and deposited them with the East India Marine Society in Salem. The members of the East India Marine Society were the founders of what is today the Peabody Essex Museum. Published in the US in 1838, the dictionaries fueled a trans-Atlantic debate about the nature of Asian languages. Catholic missionaries, their Vietnamese interlocutors, and Salem mariners made the initial connections that allowed for the scholarly conversation that played out in the pages of journals including The North American Review, The Foreign Quarterly Review, and The Canton Register.
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