Paper short abstract:

Report on a project on François-Marie de Tours' "Thesaurus Linguae Indianae", i.e. "lingua mogolana" or "Hindustānī " in context and its unique position in early missionary linguistics.

Paper long abstract:

François -Marie de Tours' dictionary of 1703, the "Thesaurus Linguae Indianae", consists of 490+424 pages and is organized in four columns: Latin key word, Hindī word in Devanāgarī, French rendering, and a phonological transcription with a self-styled set of diacritics. The orthography of Devanāgarī and the phonological transcription are, thanks to its systematic and conscious recording of the sounds, especially important tools for the reconstruction of the pronunciation of Hindī around 1700. Altogether, the language that the author describes is astonishingly close to Modern Standard Hindī. The grammar as well as the dictionary show a remarkable insight into the language the author describes, as well as a profound scholarly erudition. This becomes particularly clear in the comparison with Joan Josua Ketelaar's "oldest grammar of Hindī" (Bhatia/Machida) and word list, which was also produced in Surat some years earlier.

Several notes for the printer in the manuscript confirm that it was meant to be handed over to the printing press for publication. The title page of the grammar describes the language as "the language of the Mughals", later on in the introduction the language it is explained as being spoken in the whole Mughal empire and "along the coasts" (as expressed by François-Marie), i.e. beyond the Mughal empire in the last years of the reign of Aurangzeb. The dictionary is an early and rather unique effort to understand and explain the thesaurus of Hindustānī and to communicate it to Latin Christians.