Brollo's Dictionarium sinico-latinum · digital research edition
CHIND Dictionarium sinico-latinum
A digital environment for browsing, querying, and studying Basilio Brollo’s Dictionarium sinico-latinum, with particular attention to the manuscript Rinuccini 22, its lexical structure, graphic variants, historical romanisations, and internal relationships.
The Dictionarium sinico-latinum
Two principal versions of Basilio Brollo’s (1648–1704; Chinese names Ye Zunxiao 葉尊孝 and Ye Zongxian 葉宗賢) Dictionarium sinico-latinum are known. The first is organised according to Chinese radicals and strokes, while the later version arranges characters alphabetically according to the romanisation of their pronunciation. The original copies are traditionally dated to around 1694 and 1699. For a long time the work circulated only through manuscript copies and became an important instrument for Western missionaries studying Chinese.
Among the different copies associated with the Dictionarium, CHIN-DICTIONARY focuses on Rinuccini 22, preserved at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and connected with the earlier, radical-based version of the dictionary.
This website is one of the outcomes of the PRIN 2022 PNRR project “CHIN-DICTIONARY — Brollo’s Dictionarium sinico-latinum: linguistic innovations, textual connections, and trans-cultural translation” (Project code P2022XBX35; CUP B53D23029330001), funded by the European Union — NextGenerationEU within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), M4C2 — Investment 1.1.
Basilio Brollo
Basilio Brollo, also known as Basilio da Gemona, was a Franciscan missionary born in Gemona in 1648. He left for Asia in 1680 and reached Canton in 1684 after a journey of almost four years. During his missionary activity in China he devoted himself intensively to the study of Chinese and to lexicographic work.
The two versions of the Dictionarium sinico-latinum reflect different strategies for organising and accessing Chinese lexical material: one follows the traditional radical-and-stroke system, while the later version reorganises entries according to pronunciation. Their long manuscript circulation testifies to the practical importance of the work for later missionaries and scholars.
Reading the database together with the critical edition
The database is designed to be used in close connection with Gabriele Tola’s critical edition, Basilio Brollo’s Dictionarium sinico-latinum (Chinese-Latin dictionary): A critical edition of the manuscript Rinuccini 22 (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana), published open access by John Benjamins in Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, vol. 134 (2026).
The critical edition provides the historical, linguistic, and philological analysis of the manuscript. The relational database complements it by formalising and connecting its data: characters, historical romanisations, definitions, graphic variants, lexical relations, page and line references, and appendix material can therefore be queried across the dictionary rather than consulted only sequentially.
This structure is deliberately extensible. It can accommodate additional graphic forms, readings, meanings, and relations while preserving the link between each interpretation and its documentary evidence.
Current sections and research tools
The website combines a manuscript-oriented dictionary view with indexes and analytical tools built from the same relational data.
Browse the manuscript page by page, search characters and historical romanisations across the whole dictionary, and inspect definitions, variants, relations, and appendix sections.
Open dictionary → 02 Index & character recordsExplore characters by historical or modern radical and stroke count, then open detailed records with readings, definitions, documentary evidence, graphic forms, and relationship maps.
Open character index → 03 Text comparisonCompare an external Chinese text with the dictionary and distinguish directly attested characters, historical graphic forms, documented variants, absent forms, and recognised disyllabic units.
Open comparison tool → 04 DocumentationRead a guided explanation of the interface, data representation, dictionary rows, index visualisations, character records, and the text-comparison workflow.
Read documentation → 05 CreditsProject team, participating institutions, research infrastructure, acknowledgements, and attribution of external scholarly resources.
View credits →From romanised examples to structured data
The project also investigates the automatic extraction of examples supplied by Brollo only in romanised form and their reconstruction with Chinese characters. In the current experimental workflow, nearly 90% of the examples were correctly isolated; a further 3% consisted of trisyllabic examples that were also successfully identified.
Less than 5% of the actual examples remained unidentified by the code. Analysis of the residual errors showed that homophone and near-homophone cases account for more than half of the unresolved set, illustrating one of the principal methodological difficulties in reconstructing character sequences from historical romanisation alone.
Further reading and use of the database
Related research
Contact
Scholars, institutions, and individuals interested in cooperation or in expanding the research are invited to contact the principal investigator, Prof. Gabriele Tola. Reports of errors, corrections, and suggestions are equally welcome.
PRIN 2022 PNRR project “CHIN-DICTIONARY — Brollo’s Dictionarium sinico-latinum: linguistic innovations, textual connections, and trans-cultural translation” (Project code P2022XBX35; CUP B53D23029330001). Principal investigator: Prof. Gabriele Tola; website: chindictionary.lad-sapienza.it.
The critical edition published by John Benjamins should be cited independently according to standard bibliographical conventions.