Parler et style chinois: innovation and recovery of late Qing manuals of Chinese

This article introduces and briefly analyses an under-researched text, Parler et style chinois, composed by the French Jesuit missionary Léon Wieger (1856–1933). After a general introduction to the manual, the article examines some of its aspects. In the first chapter, suggestions by Wieger for studying Chinese and the implicit rejection of the idea of “clavis sinica” are presented; in the second, the theory of the three styles of Chinese is analysed in relation to earlier works that introduced it. The third chapter focuses on Wieger’s analysis of Chinese pronunciation and most of all of its morphology, in light of contemporary interpretations and research. Finally, the explanation of classifiers in Wieger’s work is presented. Parler et style chinois is worth researching for a variety of reasons: it is one of the few manuals composed by Western missionaries and scholars in which the texts adopted as references by the author are quoted explicitly, helping to highlight the connections between them and their textual production. Moreover, the value of the linguistic analysis carried out in the work is generally high, which helps point out the subtleness of the missionaries’ and scholars’ research on the Chinese language. Therefore, analogously to numerous other hidden relevant texts, further study on Parler et style chinois can fully contribute to a better description of the achievements accomplished in the field of Chinese missionary linguistics.