Abstract:

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Portuguese from different religious orders who quickly became bilingual settled in Macao-China, working mainly in the teaching area, patronage or missionary work, as well as some foreigners under the aegis of the Portuguese presence. During this period, they composed a range of important bibliographical sources, both lexicographical and grammatical, to aid them teaching of Chinese. Furthermore, it also provided deeper cultural contact and a more efficient catechization of local people. There was, however, a great deal of scientific curiosity in the preparation of this work, which could explain its depth and extension. This pioneer work in the description of Chinese, having been the first to make a deep contrastive study with an European language and an oriental language, at various levels of grammar, remains unexplored, and has not been yet globally edited, neither presented in a database or investigated and pedagogically used as a global corpus in the levels of graduated or post graduated studies. Many of these studies, for this day and age, show an extremely innovative approach, which include extensive cultural explanations and, also, philosophical, religious, literary, historical and social comparative information. These references, always in a comparative perspective with what was known in Portugal and Europe, are usually made and included in an integrative perspective, enabling the same document (whether grammar or dictionary) to include all the cultures, religions, philosophies, facts of history, cooking habits, etc. which made these sources important repositories of the views of the other from the perspective of the contact people and language. This important collection of manuscript and printed sources, usually very extensive, have remained, over past four centuries, out of public and academic knowledge, especially the manuscripts. This work presents and discusses a specific computational tool for lexical research, documentation and edition of lexicographical and grammatical products, which can be used and explore on private research laboratories, supporting research initiatives, or directly by students in classrooms, providing lexical elements for sporadically exercises or lecturing projects. This tool has direct access to a high-specialized document store that was designed and implemented especially to receive an vast patrimony of bibliographical sources, both lexicographical and grammatical, that were very important for teaching Portuguese to Chinese during the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, as referred previously. The textual elements of the corpus of dictionaries and grammars of Chinese and Portuguese languages contained in the document store can be access and used individually or jointly on information gathering operations. The tool provides support to match and relate different textual elements containing in one or more documents, combining them accordingly specific instructions given by users. Additionally, it can be used also to promote linguistic and philological studies about the lexical and grammatical corpus, to make the marking of microstructure of dictionaries and grammars, or simply to define and implement the introduction of dating features and authorization of lexical occurrences and grammatical items, just to name a few.

Keywords:

Technology in Teaching and Learning, Advanced Classroom Applications and Technologies, Textual and Document Stores.