‘Friendly reader and new missionary’, thus Manoel da Assumpçam addressed his readership in 1743, ‘I take it that you have come to Bengal with an Apostolic spirit and Apostolic charity, and with the ambition to convert the whole world to the law of JESUS Christ’. For the purpose of bringing ‘lost sheep to the bosom of the Church’ it was of great importance – so the Augustinian impressed in Portuguese upon his reader – to learn the Bengali language, ‘com fundamento’. It was for this reason that Assumpçam had written this work, in which he explained ‘the rules of the grammar’ and provided a ‘vocabulary in two parts, the first from Bengali to Portuguese, the second from Portuguese to Bengali’. He assured his reader that he would find in his work ‘all, or any rate the greater part, of the words used by the natives’.