The Movable Type Used by Paul Perny in His Dictionnaire français-latin-chinois de la langue mandarine parlée and His Contribution to the Typography of the Chinese Script in France

Abstract

The printing of Chinese characters, as well as their combination with alphabetic letters, has been one of the great challenges for Western typographers. When the missionary Paul Perny published his Dictionnaire français-latin-chinois de la langue mandarine parlée [French-Latin-Chinese dictionary of the spoken Mandarin language] (1869) in Paris, the conceptual design of the structure of its entries as well as the typographical quality of the Chinese characters he used were outstanding in their functionality and, hence, at a level far more advanced than the dictionaries of Chinese in combination with Western languages published in France up to that time. This paper explores the factors that enabled this dictionary to mark a turning point in the printing of Chinese characters in France.