Extremely rare first edition of a French-Tamil vocabulary, composed by Louis-Marie Mousset (1808-1888) and Louis-Savinien Dupuis (1806-1874), both missionaries in Pondicherry of the French Catholic Mission in India. The dictionary is enriched with useful references to their Dictionarium Latino-Gallico-Tamulicum (1846), being the first French-Tamil-Latin dictionary. "In the field of Tamil studies", it is still regarded "one of the most important dictionaries published today" (Lardinois). Mousset was a French Tamil scholar, priest of the "Missions etrangères de Paris" and a missionary in South India.The present dictionary, being printed in Pondicherry on the apostolic mission press, is extremely rare. Only three copies are recorded in WorldCat at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), BM Lyon and the British Library. The CCFr lists one more copy at the BMVR, Rennes. Besides the present copy, we could not trace it to be ever at auction or offered for sale.
Binding slightly worned around the edges and spine, some foxing and browning throughout, but overall in good condition. CCFr (1 copy); Linguistic Survey of India, Volume 4, Mundâ and Dravidian languages, p. 306; WorldCat (3 copies). Cf. Gregory James, Tamil lexicography (1991), pp. 105; Roland Lardinois, Scholars and prophets: sociology of India from France in the 19th-20th centuries (2018), p. 129.