Early Manila Hokkien (EMHo): Sprache, Missionarslinguistik und Migration aus der Perspektive des Bocabulario de la lengua sangleya por las letraz de el A.B.C.

01.08.2024 bis 31.07.2027

The manuscript at the core of the EMHo project is the Bocabulario de lengua sangleya por las letraz de el A.B.C. (hereafter Bocabulario). It is part of a larger volume held by the British Library (Add ms. 25.317). Previous research suggests that it was written in 1617. It consists of 223 double-sided folios with about 1400 alphabetically arranged Chinese lemmas. The original head margins have been cut; folio numbering has been added at a later stage. The Chinese entries are written in the Roman alphabet, just as the Spanish linguistic explanations, example sentences, and additional sociocultural information. Chinese characters – about 60 in total – are placed randomly and were obviously added by a later non-native hand. Apart from the added characters, the text is marked by a fairly high degree of paleographic homogeneity with few deletions or other textual interventions. However, due to the untidy handwriting, numerous incomplete sentences, repetitions, and obvious errors in the use of linguistic terminology, it must be assumed that the Bocabulario was copied from an authoritative original text that has not survived.
The source language of the Bocabulario is the regional Sinitic language known as Southern Min or Hokkien. Hokkien is a glottonym mostly used in the context of the Southeast Asian diaspora. It is sometimes used synonymously with Southern Min or treated, together with Teochew and Hainanese, as a distinct subvariety of Southern Min. Southern Min dialects are currently spoken by approximately 50 million speakers in China’s southeastern Fujian Province, in Taiwan, and among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. As a result of language contact, in most cases with Mandarin, today’s varieties often differ significantly from historical language stages. Variation also has important synchronic dimensions: there is little mutual intelligibility between Northern and Southern Min dialects, and also considerable intradialectal variation within the Southern Min group.
The EMHo project departs from the hypothesis that the language documented in the Bocabulario is a contact variety with features of various Southern Min dialects, labeled as Early Manila Hokkien by Klöter (2011, chapter 6). Research on Early Manila Hokkien strongly relies on data from sources written by European missionaries, most importantly the Arte de la lengua Chio Chiu (Manila, ca. 1620) which has been edited, translated and systematically studied by Klöter (2011).
The EMHo project pursues two overarching objectives: Documentation and analysis. The documentational approach provides a DSE comprising the digital facsimiles, a diplomatic transcription, an English translation, and critical notes. Based on the DSE on the standard of Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the project aims to provide a multi-faceted analysis of Early Manila Hokkien in its linguistic and sociohistorical contexts as well as an in-depth analysis of the Spanish language of the Philippines at the beginning of the 17th c. In the latter case the metalanguage used by missionaries in order to describe the linguistic phenomena is analyzed within the greater context of missionary linguistic activities in the Philippines and New Spain.