page 527 note 1
My attention was first drawn to the Alphabetum Barmanorum by my friend and colleague, Mr. G. E. Harvey, Lecturer in the Indian Institute, Oxford, who also very kindly wrote the note on the Mission, quoted below. Carpani knew both Ava and Pegu, spending seven years in Rangoon. Bishop Percoto sent him to Rome with ”accurate information” about the mission, Burma, and the language. There is a short note on the Alphabetum by
Luce, E. in the Journal of the Burma Research Society, 08, 1914, p. 144.Google Scholar
“The Catholic mission was small but already old when the first Protestant missionary landed in 1813. Indeed, there had always been a couple of Goanese priests in Burma from the sixteenth century onwards, under the Portuguese hierarchy in India, but they confined themselves to the feringhi colony and were, in addition, only semi-literate. The first mission, that of the Missions Etrangères de Paris (now the dominant Catholic mission in Burma), lasted only four years, 1689–1693, and ended in martyrdom, but it was followed by an unbroken succession of Italian Barnabites, 1721–1832, and it is to these that we owe our first studies of the language. There can be little doubt that both Judson, the founder of the American Baptist Mission in 1813, who wrote the first great dictionary, and the American Baptists whose studies thereafter held the field, were indebted, if only indirectly, to early Catholic MSS. which no longer survive, the bulk perishing in the fire of 1840 which burned down the headquarters mission station at Chanthayua in Shwebo district. Within four years of their arrival in 1721 the Barnabite Fathers had compiled a small dictionary, and in the next few decades they wrote MS. grammars and bilingual devotional works, but the first printed work was the Alphabetum. Its author, Melchior Carpani, who arrived in 1767 and does not seem to have returned after leaving for Rome in 1774, was stabbed by one of the Goanese priests, who persistently resented the intrusion of the Barnabites, men of a high type, whose mere presence inevitably invited comparisons; his first edition, 1776, was doubtless based on the work of his colleagues, and the second, 1787, was revised by Mantegazza. Fr. Caejetan Mantegazza, arriving in 1772, died as bishop in 1794 at Amarapura, the then capital where his tombstone still exists; when sailing for Rome in 1784 he took with him two Burmese converts, one of whom, an ex-Buddhist monk and hence a scholar, assisted in the printing, at Rome, not only of the Alphabetum but also of a Burmese prayer book, catechism, and dialogues. Fr. Johannes Maria Percoto, who, mourned by the author of the Alphabetum as a better scholar than himself, arrived in 1761 and died as bishop in 1776 at Ava the then capital—the Burmese periodically changed their capitals—left translations of epistles and gospels, Genesis, Daniel, Tobias, St. Matthew, prayers, catechism, etc., and a Burmese-Latin-Portuguese dictionary, some of which seem to survive in the Library of the College of the Propaganda at Rome. See Bishop Bigandet, Outline of the History of the Catholic Mission, 1720-1887, Rangoon, Hanthawaddy Press, 1887; Hosten and Luce, Bibliotheca Catholica Birmanica, Rangoon, British Burma Press, 1916; G. E. Harvey, History of Burma (Longmans, 1925), pp. 214, 230, 253, 278, 345, 349”.
(1704).” This MSS. is said to contain 489 pages in pt. i and 423 in pt. ii, giving Latin words in alphabetical order in the first column, “altera Indostanicas Nagaricis apicibus exaratas.” On the opposite page the Latin words are said to be written and explained in French in the first column and in the second, the “voces Indostanas” are, “quantum potis est,” also written and explained in French.
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