Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum

Before Rhodes's work, traditional Vietnamese dictionaries showed the correspondences between Chinese characters and Vietnamese chữ Nôm script. From the 17th century, Western missionaries started to devise a romanization system that represented the Vietnamese language to facilitate the propagation of the Christian faith, which culminated in the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum of Alexandre de Rhodes. created the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum. Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum was itself inspired by two earlier lost works: a Vietnamese–Portuguese dictionary by and a Portuguese–Vietnamese dictionary by António Barbosa. ==Content==

The dictionary has 8,000 Vietnamese entries with glosses in Portuguese and Latin. The publication also incorporates a summary on Vietnamese grammar (Linguae Annamiticae seu Tunchinensis Brevis Declaratio) and the codification of some contemporary pronunciations. ==Impact==

The dictionary established chữ Quốc ngữ, the Vietnamese alphabet, which was refined by later missionaries and eventually became the predominant writing system for Vietnamese. Mgr Pigneau de Béhaine contributed to these improvements with his 1783 Annamite–Latin dictionary, the manuscript of which was remitted to Mgr Jean-Louis Taberd who published in 1838 his Vietnamese–Latin / Latin–Vietnamese dictionary. ==See also==