| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 國際漢學研究所 === 99 === Placing the Ulmoçu back to its cultural-historical context, this thesis investigates how Trigault’s educational background offers the framework to deal with the Chinese script. This study finds that the art of memory, which Trigault had studied in school like other Jesuits, provided a framework of the lexicography. Trigault is clearly influenced by the Combinatory Art, which became the phonetic wheels and the tabulations of Chinese syllables that Trigault devised for language analysis. Trigault is also influenced by alphabetization, the method to arrange words in its alphabetical order. For Trigault, these intellectual heritages were his toolkit in tackling the exotic Chinese script. Moreover, I also justify Trigault and his contemporary Jesuits’ belief about Chinese characters, namely, the ideographic and universal myth. Pre-occupied with this idea, Trigault and the early modern European travelers’ observed the international intelligibility of the Chinese script and develop the idea that “the Chinese hieroglyphs” are also ideographic. In Trigault’s lexicography, this idea permitted him to place Chinese characters in the places denoted by romanized syllables. Finally, the approach taken in this thesis explores a new horizon in the study on the Ulmoçu and underscores how a missionary’s intellectual background contributes to his analysis of foreign language.
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