Born in
Saint-Étienne, Jean-Louis Taberd was ordained priest in
Lyon in 1817. He joined the Paris Foreign Missions Society in 1820, and was appointed to become a missionary in
Cochinchina,[a] modern
Vietnam. In 1827 he was appointed
Vicar Apostolic of Cochinchina, and Bishop of the
titular see of Isauropolis in 1830.[2][3] With the persecutions of the Emperor of Vietnam
Minh Mạng, Mgr Taberd was forced to escape the country.
Jean-Louis Taberd first went to
Penang and then
Calcutta, where, with the help of
Lord Auckland and the
Asiatic Society he was able to publish his own Latin-Vietnamese dictionary in 1838.[3] He improved upon the previous works of
Alexandre de Rhodes and
Pigneau de Béhaine, whose 1773 Vietnamese-Latin dictionary he had been handed in manuscript form.[5] He also published Pigneau's dictionary in 1838 under the name Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum.[1]
In his work The Geography of Cochin China, Taberd reports the
Paracel Islands (today a hotly disputed island territory in Southeast Asia) as having been conquered and claimed by Emperor
Gia Long in 1816.[6]
Legacy
In the late 19th century, the renowned Catholic college Institut Taberd was founded in
Saigon by the
Brothers of the Christian Schools and, since 1943, to educate a Vietnamese elite.[7][8]
Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum, primitus inceptum ab illustrissimo
P.J. Pigneaux, dein absolutum et ed. a J. L. Taberd,
Serampore, 1838
The Geography of Cochin China
Notes on the Geography of Cochin China, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 6/7 (1837/39)
Notes
^Jean-Louis Taberd was likely among the first to explain the meaning of "
Cochin China" in his 1837 scientific article; see quotation in Notes on Vietnam History.[4]