Spanish and Taiwanese scholars have discovered the world’s oldest extant and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Archives.
The 400-year-old “Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum” (DHS) provides not only the Chinese characters and Mandarin terms to Spanish words, but also their equivalent in Hokkien, the language spoken in Taiwan and Fujian province in southeastern China where many of today’s overseas Chinese came from.
In the Philippines, many Chinese speak “Fookien” or “Philippine Hokkien.”
Ironically, the dictionary, cataloged in the UST Archives as “Vocabulario Espanol-Chino con caracteres chinos (Tomo 215),” was found with the label, “vale muy …
Keep on reading: World’s oldest and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary found in UST