Jean-Louis Taberd (1794–1840)[2] was a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and titular bishop of Isauropolis, in partibus infidelium.[3]
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]
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]