Theory that the final section is a multilingual glossary

[eggyk]

Thus his glossary, at best, would have contained only a small fraction of those thousands of terms. It would not list "dān xióng jī" because the Author knew that it meant "red rooster", and it would not list "kài nì" because he would have not been able to understand the Dictator's explanation.

And moreover it is quite possible that his native language was not a major European language. (That could explain why it has been so difficult to identify the language of the month names.)

All this to say that his glossary would have been of limited use for himself, but practially useless for any other European readers.  What those readers would need was a comprehensive dictionary from phonetic "Chinese" to a major European language.  But the first one, (Mandarin-Latin) was compiled and published in Rome only in the late 1500s...

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? 

I'm not stating that this glossary would be a phonetic transcription of a foreign document, but that the names of each object would be written phonetically for the different languages that the author would interact with. 

Using my example from the OP about apples: 

Malus domestica: Pomme, Poma, also Apfel, Appel, sometimes Malum or mala, is found in....

Written like this:
Malus domestica pomme poma qafpel appel raiin malum mala am ol..... 

What "language" is the above text? There are only a couple of words in the sentence that are truly the authors language, but the rest are phonetic transcriptions of a specific word in other languages. If this was being used in a non-academic context, this would be incredibly useful in areas with frequent travellers of different tongues. 

Imagine a buyer looking for apples, not knowing exactly where the seller is from.

"Pomme? Poma?", 
"???",
apfel? appel?",
"???",
"hmm, let me check my book... malum? mala?",
"Ahh, mala! Yes right here!"

The inverse works too, with a seller trying to sell apples to various travellers wandering by: 

"Pomme! Poma! Apfel! Appel! Malum! Mala! We sell Pomme! Poma! Apfel! Appel! Malum! Mala!" 
"Oh, that person looks asian.. check the apple section in the book... where's the marker for asian words... ah! píngguǒ! PingGwo! Ku-shu!"


This type of usage would be personal and the book would become useless as soon as the readers of the phonetic script die. It would also not be like other genuine bilingual or multilingual dictionaries, which attempt to translate all types of words: nouns, verbs, pronouns, tenses for as many words as possible. This would be far more limited, and only for the objects useful to the author. 

You only need 1 word to buy or sell apples to a person, and that word is "Apple" in the person's native language. Context and handwaving does the rest.