The early European missionaries who came to India contributed a great deal to the discipline of lexicography in Indian languages. However, as the British gained politically and English became the language of power, most works in other European tongues faded into insignificance.
Two such forgotten lexicons of historic and linguistic importance — Kannada-to-Latin and Latin-to-Kannada dictionaries — compiled by Catholic priests of The Paris Foreign Mission Society in the mid-19th century have recently been discovered in the archives of St. Mary's Basilica, the oldest church in Bangalore.
The first, Dictionarium Canarense-Latinum, was compiled by Jean-Marie Auguste Bouteloup in 1855, and the second, Dictionarium Latino-Canarense, by Etienne Louis Charbonnaux in 1861.
To this day, these are the only dictionaries that translate directly from Kannada to Latin and vice versa. Both mention ‘Bengalori' as the place where they were printed. The latter has now been reprinted by the Akhila Karnataka Catholic Christara Kannada Sangha, after 149 years, and will be released in August.
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