Aspects of Mongol writing today (original) (raw)

Reconstructing Babel: Rashīd al-Dīn, Chinese Writing, and the Quest for a Universal Script in Mongol Iran 1

Central Asiatic Journal, 2024

This article examines the passages on the Chinese script by the famed Persian scholar and vizier Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 1318), ostensibly the earliest Western Eurasian author to provide a detailed description of this writing system. The article is divided into two sections. The first section explores Rashīd al-Dīn's encounter with the Chinese script, retracing his journey from astonishment at this exotic writing system to the development of a structured interpretation of its working and main qualities. It reveals how Rashīd al-Dīn regarded Chinese characters as an ideographic system of writing capable of conveying meaning directly to the mind through vision independent of language-and, therefore, as a universal writing system. The second section provides context for Rashīd al-Dīn's interpretation of the Chinese script by examining the key factors that arguably contributed to its development, with attention to the vizier's prior knowledge of Chinese civilization and his concerns as a prominent court intellectual and advisor to the Mongol court of Iran, the Ilkhans.

Linguistic Features of the Mongolian Text of the Tyr Trilingual Inscription (1413)

2014

The paper deals with the Mongolian inscription on the first Tyr stele (1413) — a little known monument of Preclassical Written Mongol which is now found in Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). In the paper, the main grammatical, phonetic, and lexical features of the text are described, which are charac-teristic of Preclassical Written Mongol and Middle Mongol monuments altogether. While retaining a number of clearly archaic features, probably of Proto-Mongolic origin, the inscription contains some innovative developments which seem to date from the Post-Proto-Mongolic stage and reflect colloquial and/or dialectal influence. A few phonological and lexical features, as well as the place and circumstances of its appearance, enables us to consider it as belonging to the Eastern dialect zone of Middle Mongol.

The Mongol Text of the Tyr Trilingual Inscription (1413): Some New Readings and Interpretations

International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 1.1 (2019): 125–161

This paper presents a new approach to reading the Preclassical Mongol inscription on the 1413 Tyr stele, now kept at Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). The stele contains texts carved in three languages: Chinese, Jurchen, and Mongol. The Jurchen and Mongol texts are very close to each other in content , as well as in the grammatical structure of words and sentences. For this reason, some missing and previously illegible parts of the Mongol text can be reconstructed and read on the basis of the Jurchen version. Lines 2 and 3 of the Mongol inscription have already been discussed earlier in a separate publication. In the present paper, the same approach, combined with a careful investigation of all the existing photos and rubbings of the inscription, is extended to lines 4 to 9.

A Full Inspection on Chinese Characters Used in the Secrete History of the Mongols

The Secrete History of the Mongols (SHM) is a special Mongolian historical document transliterated with Chinese characters as phonetic symbols, which feature causes many multivariate analyses in later ages. The discussion of this paper mainly focuses on the data of used Chinese characters, the frequencies, and the rules of transliteration on SHM. All the statistic data and the analysis are based on the electronic text of SHM, which provides those important data in an allround way, including the whole Chinese-transliterated characters, aligned Chinese glosses by the side of Chinese-transliterated characters, and Chinese translational paragraphs. Furthermore, four types of Chinese characters as phonetic symbols and their statistic information have been discussed, which are type C, xC, Cy, and xCy as in the main body of the text: ᅝ, Ё ᬅ, ┃ࢦ, and ა ‫.څ̣‬ Shortly, this statistics is so far the most completed inspection on the text of the Secrete History of the Mongols.

A Sketch of the Earliest Mongolic Language: the Brāhmī Bugut and Khüis Tolgoi Inscriptions

A Sketch of the Earliest Mongolic Language: the Brāhmī Bugut and Khüis Tolgoi Inscriptions, 2019

The present article deals with the earliest known sources on a Mongolic language discovered in 2014 by the international team Dieter Maue (Germany), Mehmet Ölmez (Turkey), Étienne de La Vaissière and Alexander Vovin (both France) on two inscriptions. The importance of this discovery is threefold: first, it gives us a glimpse of the earliest Mongolic language, predating by more than six hundred years the hitherto known earliest monument in a Mongolic language; second, in spite of the fact that the language of the inscriptions is somewhat close to Middle Mongolian, it provides the evidence of certain features that were previously only suggested for reconstructed forms of Mongolic; and finally, it significantly changes our general understanding of the mediaeval ethnolinguistic history of Central Asia.

The Brāhmī inscriptions of Mongolia: Whose decipherment

This short note serves the purpose of setting the record of the decipherment of the Mongolian Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut inscriptions straight. Until recently, the Brāhmī inscriptions on the Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut stelae in Mongolia remained undeciphered, and any knowledge concerning the language in which they were written had been lost centuries ago. Finally, in the 2000s, Dieter Maue, an epigraphist and a leading specialist on the Brāhmī script, made a new reading of the inscriptions, allowing, for the first time, the question concerning the underlying language to be approached in a meaningful way. Then, the French historian Étienne de La Vaissière invited Alexander Vovin, during the latter's visit to Paris, to have a look at Maue's reading of the Khüis Tolgoi inscription. Vovin recognized the language as Mongolic, but there were still too many unidentifiable words and grammatical forms to allow for a complete translation. In 2014, an international team consisting of Dieter Maue (Germany), Alexander Vovin (USA, then already permanently working in France), Mehmet Ölmez (Turkey), and Étienne de La Vaissière (France) was formed, and the group travelled to Mongolia, accompanied by two specialists in 3D photography with the relevant instruments for taking 3D pictures. The principal objective was to document the inscriptions as completely as possible. The team surveyed the inscriptions and took 3D pictures of the Khüis Tolgoi I and Brāhmī Bugut inscriptions, but could not do the same with Khüis Tolgoi II due to circumstances beyond the team's control. For more details on the team's travel to Mongolia, see Ölmez (2018). After the survey, Dieter Maue revised his epigraphic analysis and Alexander Vovin offered a first linguistic analysis and interpretation of the texts. The results were reported at the

Luvsandorj, Jugder (2008): Diacritic marks in the Mongolian script and the 'darkness of confusion of letters'

MONGOLO-TIBETICA PRAGENSIA ’08, Linguistics, Ethnolinguistics, Religion and Culture. Vol. 1/1. Edited by J. Vacek and A. Oberfalzerová. Charles University and Triton, Praha 2008, pp. 45–98. ISSN 1803-5647, 2008

This paper deals with some of the results of the 18th century critical discussion and argument among scholars concerning the usage and function of the dots as diacritic marks in Mongolian script. This is of importance not only for research into the history of Mongolian philology but also for the present and future practical use of the Mongolian script. There are two dots in front of (i.e. to the left of) the Mongolian letter γ (designating voiced back velar in classical Mongolian orthography). However, there were many variants in the usage of the dots and in the 18th century this became the subject of argument and sharp criticism, which even referred to the situation as the 'darkness of confusion of letters' (üsüg-ün endegürel-ün qarangγui; Kh. үсгийн эндүүрлийн харанхуй). 0. Diacritic marks The principal diacritic mark 1 of the Mongolian script is the dot, or čeg 2 (Kh. цэг). In order to specify the varying phonetic meanings (polyphony) of some basic letters (graphemes), either a single dot (dang čeg; Kh. дан цэг) was placed in front (to the left), or a double dot (dabqur čeg; Kh. давхар цэг) was placed in front (to the left) or at the back (to the right) of the relevant letters. а) The function of a single dot placed in front (to the left) of the relevant letter is to differentiate the letter n (a simple 'tooth' with a dot) used as an initial letter of a syllable from the letter n used 1