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| Original title | Vocabulario da lingoa de Iapam |
|---|---|
| Language | Japanese and Portuguese |
Publication date | 1603 |
| Publication place | Japan |
Original text | Vocabulario da lingoa de Iapam atGallica |
TheNippo Jisho (日葡辞書, literally the "Japanese–Portuguese Dictionary") orVocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam (Vocabulário da Língua do Japão in modern Portuguese; "Vocabulary of the Language of Japan" in English) is aJapanese-to-Portuguese dictionary compiled byJesuit missionaries and published inNagasaki,Japan, in 1603. Containing entries for 32,293 Japanese words with explanations in Portuguese, it was the first dictionary of Japanese to a European language. The original publication uses theLatin alphabet exclusively, without Japanese characters (i.e.kanji orkana).
Facsimile editions were published in Japan in 1960 byIwanami Shoten and again in 1973 and 1975 by Benseisha. The Benseisha reproduction is generally considered the clearer and more legible. A 1630 translation intoSpanish published inManila by theDominicanfriars of theUniversity of Santo Tomas,[1] an 1869 translation into French, and a 1980 translation into Japanese (by Iwanami Shoten) also exist.[citation needed] As of 2023,[update] a translation into English by Jeroen Lamers was in the works.[2]
TheSociety of Jesus (commonly known as the Jesuits), with the cooperation of Japanese people, compiled thedictionary over several years. They intended it to serve the need ofmissionaries for language study and research. The Portuguese priestJoão Rodrigues is supposed to have been the main organizer of the project and its editor: having already published works likeArte da Lingoa de Iapam (Arte da Língua do Japão in modern Portuguese; "Art of the Language of Japan" in English) andArte breue da lingoa Iapoa (Arte breve da Língua Japonesa in modern Portuguese; "Brief Art of the Japanese Language" in English) explaining the Japanese language for missionaries, he was known among the Portuguese community as having the highest proficiency in Japanese.
The approximately 32,000 entries are arranged alphabetically. Each word is displayed in theLatin alphabet according toPortuguese conventions of the late sixteenth century, and explained in Portuguese.
The dictionary's primary purpose was to teach missionaries spoken Japanese. As needed, the authors identify such things as regional dialect, written and spoken forms, women's and children's language, elegant and vulgar words, andBuddhist vocabulary. Many of these words had never been written in any known text before theNippo Jisho was published, and the system of romanization used by theNippo Jisho reflects thephonetics of 16th-century Japanese (Late Middle Japanese), which differs from modern Japanese: this furnishes present-daylinguists valuable insight into the Japanese language of theSengoku period ofJapanese history and how it has evolved into its modern form. The dictionary also yields information on rhyming words, individual pronunciation, meaning, usage, names of plants and animals, popular phrases, and customs of the times.
Because this dictionary contains the earliest known written example of many words, Japanese language dictionaries often cite it as a primary source, such as the 14-volumeNihon Kokugo Daijiten (Japanese:日本国語大辞典), known in English as "Shogakukan's Japanese Dictionary", published byShogakukan.
The creators of theNippo Jisho devised asystem of transcription for the16th-century Japanese language with contemporary Portuguese Roman letters. Take the following example from Michael Cooper's review of theJisho in the journalMonumenta Nipponica in 1976.
Regional differences betweenKyūshū andKyoto speech are often noted, with preference given to the latter. "Qinchacu." (modernkinchaku巾着) Apurse carried in thesash. In Ximo (Shimo, present-day Kyūshū) it is called "Fōzō" (modernhōzō 宝蔵).
In this example the syllable modernly romanized aski (き) was transcribed 'qi',ku (く) as 'cu', and the modern syllable groupha,hi,fu,he andho (はひふへほ) were transcribed 'fa', 'fi', 'fu', 'fe', and 'fo' respectively. Also the syllableo (を) was written 'vo',tsu (つ) was 'tçu',shi (し) was 'xi', ande (え) was sometimes 'ye'. To what extent these particular spellings reflect how Japanese was actually pronounced in the 16th century is of great interest to scholars of Japanesehistorical linguistics.
Other examples:
Only four copies of the original 1603 edition still exist. Three of them are in Europe. One copy is located at theBodleian Library, University of Oxford; one is at theBibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (available online since 2013); and one is at thePublic Library of Évora [pt] in Portugal. The fourth copy is located at theNational Library of Brazil, and it belonged to the wife of Emperor Dom Pedro II,Teresa Cristina.[3][note 1] In 2020, afacsimile edition of this copy was published.[5]
Media related toNippo Jisho at Wikimedia Commons