Martino Martini and the First Grammar of Mandarin Chinese Ever Written and Published

Abstract

Martino Martini (1614-1661) was a main contributor to historical and geographical knowledge about China in seventeenth century Europe. His works strongly influenced the intellectuals of his time. He was also author of a less popular, though no less important, work; a grammar of the Chinese language.According to Giuliano Bertuccioli, Martini attended to the compilation of a Grammatica Sinica, in 1652, while he was detained by the Dutch in Batavia for eight months. He left a copy of it to Andreas Cleyer (1634-1697/98). The manuscript was sent to Europe in 1698 and preserved in Berlin. In 1716, T. S. Bayer (1694-1738) made a copy of it, but the original has not been found.Once in Europe, Martini left another copy of the grammar to Jacob Gohl (1596-1667), a Dutch orientalist. From this original manuscript other copies were most likely made, and this could explain the presence of grammars very similar to that of Martini's in the libraries of Glasgow, Berlin, and Krakow. These copies have at different times been modified and extended by Philippe Couplet and Christian Mentzel.After a detailed analysis of Martini's correspondence and a long search for reference in rare books catalogues and manuals for bibliophiles, Ⅰ succeeded in finding two copies with an identical structure but entitled Grammatica Linguae Sinensis in Cambrai and in Vigevano. The latter was Martini's gift to Juan Caramuel (l606-1682), a Spanish polymath who had studied Chinese with him.Further researches have led me to the discovery of a printed version of Martini's Grammatica Linguae Sinensis attached to the 1696 edition of M. Thevenot's Relations des divers voyages curieux. Thus, Martini's grammar has been proved to be the first grammar of Mandarin Chinese ever written and published. Through a comparative analysis of the extant copies in both manuscript and printed form, and at the same time trying to separate the contributions to the original work given by other scholars who possessed it, the present study aims at reconstructing the evolutionary course of Martini's grammar from the older Grammatica Sinica to the refined and annotated copy of the Grammatica Linguae Sinensis.