Resources for studying Latin and Greek in Chinese

Gu Zhiying, now a senior at Shanghai University, and soon to be studying classics at the graduate level at Renmin University in Beijing, passes on this list of resources for the study of Latin and Greek for Chinese speakers. If you are interested in more information please send me an email and I can get you in touch with Zhiying.

Dictionaries

  1. Dictionarium Latino-Sinicum, 《拉丁汉文辞典》, 1965 / 1980, by WuJinrui (吴金瑞). Wu was a Catholic priest in Taichung(台中), he said in the preface that this dictionary cost him 15 years. Most of the illustrative sentences are from Cicero and Caesar. (Difficult to buy.)
  2. Dictionarium Latino-Sinicum, 《拉丁语汉语词典》, 1988, by XieDaren (谢大任). It said that Xie majored in medical science, but there seems no more information of him. This dictionary is based on a Latin-Russian dictionary (named Латинско-Русский Словарь, by И. Х. Дворецкий and Д. Н. Корольков, published in 1949. I can’t read Russian, a friend who can read both Latin and Russian told me this). To some extent, Wu’s Dictionary may be a little better than Xie’s, because we cannot know from which work an illustrative sentence comes. 辞典cidianand 词典cidian and same in Chinese. (Also difficult to buy.)
  3. Dictionarium Parvum Latino-Sinicum, 《拉丁语汉语词典》, 1988, by XieDaren (谢大任). It’s an abridged edition of Xie’s Dictionarium Latino-Sinicum. (Difficult to buy.)
  4. Dictionarium Sinico-Latinum, 《汉洋字典》, 1853. It’s a CHINESE-LATIN dictionary, rare and interesting. The preface is in Latin, no more introduction is necessary.
  5. Lexicon Magnum Latino-Sinicum and Lexicon Manuale Latino-Sinicum Sinico-Latinum, mini-dictionaries.

An Austrian professor in RUC named Leopold Leeb (his Chinese name is 雷立柏[LeiLibo]) is popularizing Latin and Greek for undergraduates as well as senior high school students in Beijing, he has compiled a Dictionarium Parvum Latino-Sinicum (《拉丁语汉语简明辞典》, 2011). Perhaps Leeb’s mini-dictionary is easier to use, it is very easy to buy on Amazon.

Grammars

  1. Syntaxis Linguae Latinae Grammatica, 《拉丁文句学》, 1942, by missionaries. The preface is also in Latin.
  2. Basic Course of Latin, 《拉丁语基础》, 1983, By XiaoYuan (肖原). It does not have an original Latin or English name, the title is my translation.
  3. Lingua Latina pro Auto-Studio, 《拉丁语自学读本》, 1989, By XieDaren (谢大任).

Some Latin and Greek courses have been translated or published in China these years, such as Wheelock’s Latin (6e., 2009) and professor LiuXiaofeng (刘小枫)’s Καιρός: Reading Greek [revised edition] (《凯若斯:古希腊文读本[增订版]》, 2013). LuoNiansheng (罗念生) and ShuiJianfu (水建馥)’s Classical Greek-Chinese Dictionary (《古希腊语汉语词典》, 2004) has also been published (but there are many misprints produced in the course of importing Greek letters, what I found have already been more than 300. Luo and Shui passed away before the dictionary published.

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