ABSTRACT
The , Chinese-Foreign language (bilingual) vocabularies, are a valuable and interesting source of information for our knowledge of the earlier history of many Asian languages, the major period of extant record being the míng (1368-1643) and Qīng (1644-1911) dynasties (Féng 1981). These topically arranged word-lists have been well known to sinologues, and to Western ones since the late eighteenth century (Davidson 1975:I, 296), the first of them being published, or ‘edited’, with translations in 1822 (loc.cit.). Of special relevance to South East Asia are the studies or annotated translations of the relating to the Bā-yí (Yúnnán Tais) and Bābǎi (Chiengmai Tais) (Müller 1892); to Malacca Malay (Edwards & Blagden 1931) and to Cham (Edwards and Blagden 1939), both of which are based on a manuscript, the Gègúo (c.1549), in the archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London; Vietnamese (Gaspardone 1953; Ch’en Chingho 1966-68; Davidson 1975), and Thai (Shintani 1974).
