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Paper short abstract

Unicorns often entered the lexicon of early bilingual dictionaries, such as the Dicionário Português-Chinês and the Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam. This paper examines how lexicographers demystified “the strange,” yet also exposed the strangeness of language through locating one-to-one equivalences.

Paper long abstract

The production of the first Japanese-Dutch dictionary is celebrated in a painting of scholars of Western-learning gathering on New Year’s Day 1795 at the behest of Ōtsuki Gentaku (1757-1827). In it, an alcove displays the dictionary beneath a hanging scroll of a narwhal. The image traces back to Gentaku’s earlier discovery in Rokumotsu shinshi (1786) that the unikōru (unicorn), a strange creature of global fascination, was, in fact, a small whale with a horn. The bilingual dictionary emerged during the early modern period as a tool that not only collected other knowledge systems, but also juxtaposed disparate linguistic regimes and orthographies. Its structure required that dictionary-makers locate parallels within the respective cosmological systems of their work to construct one-to-one linguistic equivalences. An example of this challenging task is the attempt to translate various concepts of the one-horned animal (unicorn, qilin, rhinoceros, narwhal, etc.). Iterations of the one-horned animal appear in the Dicionário Português-Chinês (c. 1583-1588) of the Jesuit Mission to China, as well as in the Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam (1603) of the mission to Japan.

Tracing the translations of the one-horned animal from its lexicographical origins in Antonio de Nebrija’s Castilian-Latin Dictionarium (1495), this paper investigates its role in Jesuit dictionary-making practices to explore the one-horned animal as an interstice between not only naturalistic inquiry and fantasy, but also European and Sinitic cosmology. Furthermore, these iterations demonstrate how Chinese, Japanese, and European dictionary-makers engaged with conceptual translation to quantify language and orthography, revealing the consequences of collecting language along epistemological affinities. Ultimately, the material dictionary itself, as a cipher of communication, enacts the bidirectional transformation of language and other ways of knowing.