Notitia linguæ Sinicæ of Premare.

Translated into English by J. G. Bridgman. Canton : Printed at the Office of the Chinese Repository, 1847. Octavo (210 x 140 mm), recent half calf over marbled papered boards, spine with gilt decoration and red morocco title label lettered in gilt; pp. [8], [i]-xxxv, [2], 26-328; text in English with passages and examples in Chinese characters throughout; title with early ex libris stamp of Samuel H. Turner and a later Chinese ownership stamp in red; internally very clean, an excellent example.

Rare first edition of the first English translation of Prémare’s landmark grammar of the Chinese language, printed in Canton. The translator, James Granger Bridgman of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, was a cousin of missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman.

The French Jesuit Father Joseph Prémare (1666-1736) worked as a missionary in Guangxi from 1699 until 1724, and subsequently, after banishment by the Yongzheng Emperor, in Macau, where he remained until his death. He completed his Notitia linguae sinicae in 1729, and the following year his original manuscript entered the collection of the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris. Notitia linguae sinicae would surely have become a landmark work on the Chinese language in the West in the eighteenth century, yet it was not published until almost a hundred years after his death. The first edition was printed on the Anglo-Chinese press in Malacca in 1831.

Three individuals were chiefly responsible for Prémare’s work finally appearing in print. The first of these was Stanislas Julien (1797-1873), a student of the great French sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. (Julien would take over from Abel-Rémusat as Chair of Chinese at the Collège de France after the latter’s death in 1832, a position he held for over 40 years). It was Julien who, in the early 1820s, made at least two manuscript copies of Prémare’s original manuscript, one of which was acquired by missionary and sinologist Robert Morrison, President of the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca. Morrison presented this manuscript copy to the College in 1826. An anonymous patron later funded the publication of Prémare’s work at the College’s press in 1831.

The first edition of the first English translation, made by J. G. Bridgman, was printed in Canton some sixteen years later, yet it would appear to be every bit as elusive as the 1831 Malacca imprint. The Rare Book Hub database contains no record of any copy later than the one offered over a century and a half ago by Bangs in 1860.

Cordier, BS 1669. (See cols. 1664-1669 for Cordier’s detailed notes on not only the various nineteenth-century printed editions of Notitia linguæ Sinicæ, but also the various known manuscript versions.