Early Qing evidences of classifiers usage in Western missionaries Chinese texts

As it is well-known, modern syntactic and grammatical analysis of the Chinese language began with the publication of Ma Jianzhong’s Mashi wentong 馬氏文通. In previous centuries the Chinese scholars have developed only a small range of grammatical categories to analyze their own language, mostly adopting the semantic criteria as main value for discriminating among different lexical categories. In modern Chinese, a peculiar part of the speech is the one of the socalled «classifiers», or liangci 量詞, as was first indicated by Li Jinxi 黎錦熙 in 1924. Western and Chinese scholars have devoted great attention to the origin of classifier in Chinese and, in particular, Alain Peyraube in 1998 have demonstrated that, most probably, the classifiers appeared not earlier than the Early Han times, around the second century B.C. and their usage was eventually widely spread during medieval time, to become common in early Mandarin Chinese. If the history of the usage of classifier in Chinese is now under scrutiny by scholars, is not yet clear when the Chinese identified such a class of word, and when they first produced lists of such terms, with the indication of their usage. A thorough review of various lists of classifiers prepared by Western missionaries beginning from the early seventeenth century can be seen as a contribution to the understanding of Qing Chinese mandarin lexicon and grammar.