21-02-2026, 03:46 PM
(21-02-2026, 02:10 PM)eggyk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The idea of a multilingual glossary (and by multilingual, I mean more than a 1-1 translation of a foreign glossary) would be different to this, right?
Yes. My idea of the Author's glossary, if it existed at all, is that it would map phonetic "Chinese to his native language. Where "Chinese" would be the local language -- which still could be anything from 1400's Mandarin to Tibetan...
In my mind, the Author would have been an educated person, but not a scholar or doctor himself. And I can't imagine him being a missionary. Thus he must have been a merchant, like Marco Polo's uncles, and that other Venetian who lived in Burma for some years, buying rubies to sell in Europe. Or maybe an adventurer, like Polish Gaspar da Gama. He probably did not understand those books himself, or have personal interest in their contents, but could tell that they could be of substantial interest to some people back home.
But all these are just guesses, of course.
All the best, --stolfi