HOFFMAN, Johann Joseph.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Shopping Dialogues, in Japanese, Dutch, and English. = Winkelgesprekken in het Hollandsch, Engelsch en Japansch. First edition, compiled by one of von Siebold's proteges. Hoffman commissioned a new set of Chinese character types for its production and utilized Karl Lepsius's newly developed standard for transcribing foreign orthography into the Latin alphabet.Johann Joseph Hoffman (1805-1878) was one of the foremost academics that established the study of Japanese in Europe. He worked under the famous traveller von Siebold, contributed to his mentor's groundbreaking Nippon (1832) and Bibliotheca Japonica (1833-41), and was appointed Japanese interpreter to the government of the Dutch East Indies. His command of Japanese also allowed him to produce a number of important early grammars, phrasebooks, and dictionaries.Shopping Dialogues was the first of such multilingual phrasebooks to be produced by a European, and perhaps the second ever published following Motoki Shozo's A New Familiar Phrases of the English and Japanese Languages (1859). Hoffman built on Motoki's foundation by fixing grammatical errors, converting the style to British English, and most importantly by rewriting the phonetic transcriptions of the Japanese using Lepsius's standard alphabet, such that both native Dutch and English speakers could pronounce them correctly. The work also "represents an innovation in the printing of unfamiliar type... Finding that no metal fonts of the requisite quality were availabl

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