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Bound in recent quarter morocco over marbled papered boards, spine with raised bands and contrasting title label lettered in gilt. Extremely rare. I have located only 1 copy (at Villanova) in North America. Lithographically printed on leaves folded in the traditional Chinese manner; partly unopened; both the title-leaf and the final leaf of the index have been re-margined, with some restoration at corners, otherwise sound and clean throughout. The book was published by the Mission catholique de Tou-cé-wei, a prominent French Jesuit Catholic mission, orphanage, and vocational art school founded in 1864 in the Xujiahui (Zi-ka-wei) district of Shanghai. Cordier (despite his close friendship with Pfister) was not aware of this work. It does not appear in Bibliotheca Sinica or in the list of Pfister's works at the end of Cordier's "In Memoriam". The rare sole edition of this unusual work published by the Catholic Mission in Shanghai. It comprises lithographic printings of the Ave Maria (Hail Mary) prayer in 340 different languages and dialects, employing the original script, written out by the author in every instance, for each particular language, such as for Ge?ez, Badlit (Bisaya), Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Korean, Russian, Celtic, Arabic, Persian, Sinhala (Sri Lankan), etc. Chippewa (Southwestern Ojibwe) is written in the syllabary created in 1840 by James Evans of the Wesleyan Missionary Society. A large number of the languages represented in the work are those of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Some examples of the languages of the Americas, spoken by peoples from Canada to the Caribbean to South America, include Huron, Iroquois, Chinuk Wawa, Beaver, Gwich?in (under the outdated, offensive name Loucheux), Nimíipuu, Potawatomi (Neshnabémwen), Martinique Creole, Quechua, Guaraní, and Aymara; Those from Asia are the most numerous, and include Malay, Bisaya (Cebuano), Pampango, Cantonese (and an array of Chinese dialects), Karen (spoken in Myanmar), Malagasy, Bisaya, Tagalog, Korean, and Japanese (shown in a variety of scripts); from Africa we have Tswana, Shilluk (Dhog Collo), Kabyle (Taqbaylit), Zulu, Ge?ez, Arabic, and Wolof. There is a prayer in an Australian Aboriginal language which, although generically described as 'Australien', is the Kaurna Warra (language) spoken by the Kaurna Miyurna (people), who are the Yaitya mathanya (traditional owners/custodians) of Wama Tarntanya (the Adelaide Plains). The book was compiled by the French Jesuit missionary, linguist, historian and sinologist Fr. Aloys (Louis) Pfister (1833-1891), also known by his Chinese name Fei Laizhi (Chinese: ??? / ???), who served as librarian at the Catholic Bibliotheca Zikawei (now the Xujiahui Library), established in 1847 by the Jesuits five miles from Shanghai. Pfister had joined the Society of Jesus in 1852 and arrived in Kiang-nan in 1867. In addition to his duties as librarian, he ministered to people -in their language- in remote Chinese villages. Coronary disease forced him to retire to Shanghai in 1889, where he died, in the Yang-king-pang residence, in 1891. Pfister's project was an extraordinary undertaking, and its publication a remarkable achievement, one that was made possible by position at the Zikawei library, which he reorganized and expanded, where he could receive and organize correspondence and books from his fellow Catholic missionary-linguists in other parts of the world. At the end of the book, Pfister provides a remarkable index of the sources, both printed and manuscript, from which he drew his information, much of it sent directly to him in China. For the Abenaki entry, Pfister writes that he relied on a version produced by a native Abenaki, sent to him in a letter by James Perron (1818-1890), former Superior of the Canadian Mission, from Woodstock College in Maryland, "Abénaqui, écrit par Job Laurent, abénaqui de nation, et envoyé de Woodstock, 1881, par le R.P. Perron." In the.
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