Chinese Missionary Linguistics

Book excerpt: In the spring of 2011 (March, 7-8) the Department of Oriental Studies of Sapienza University of Rome and the Ferdinand Verbiest Institute jointly organized a workshop and a roundtable on ?China Mission and Linguistics?. The workshop took place in the suggestive location of the Academia Belgica in the very heart of Rome. The aims of this workshop were, on the one hand, to update the state of the art and, on the other hand, to give, young scholars the opportunity to present their research and discuss their results with senior scholars. The final roundtable not only highlighted how the linguistic research is carried out in different institutions and countries, but also showed the need for sharing the results of the research, and above all the need for spaces of discussion and debate.00This volume brings together a series of essays analysing important new data on the linguistic work carried out by Western missionaries in China following an ideal diachronic thread linking men (missionaries) from different countries and different Christian religious traditions (Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant). If, on the one hand, all of them shared a common ideal as well as a common purpose ? spreading Christianity among the Chinese ?, on the other hand, the strategies they put in practice were different.