Re: Mongolian (was: Re: Fluency Wish-List

At 17:33 14.4.2000 -0400, Kenji Schwarz wrote:

>I'd agree with you about the Vagintara script, but not, I'm afraid, the
>Todoo script for OIrat -- something about it just rubs me the wrong way.
>(And, really! if they wanted a rationalized, improved, and just plain
>superior version of the old Mongol script, why couldn't they have just
>adopted the Manchu one? It is, after all, perfect :)  )
Have to agree on that one.  Possibly the good Lama didn't know it.  (Or was
anti-Chinese!)  I'e also read that the linguist involved with Vagintara
(the name escapes me) made his own attempt at a modernizing the Mongol
script before devising the Cyrillic to save his neck.  Never seen it tho.

> > Somehow Old Mongolian as transliterated from the Uighur script looks
> > euphonious -- downright Finnish! :-) -- while transliterated from
> > hP'ags-pa it looks cocophonous.
>
>Well, someday, someone really should adopt it for a conlang -- some little
>minority nationality in Yunnan/Sichuan that kept some traditions going
>from the Yuan dynasty?
Boudewijn already has!  I like the script, but not the way Mongol is
rendered into it.

> > I have to get hold of a phonemic transcription and render it into
> > Hangyl! ;-)
>
>That would be interesting to see!  And, after all, at the risk of stepping
>on Korean(ist) toes, it does seem to me to be likely that it's directly
>inspired by 'phags-pa script, anyway.
Not really disputed by the -ists any more.  But neither Siddham nor actual
Tibetan can be ruled out as influences.   There was a Sakya presence in
Beijing at the time, and the Gelugba were at their most active in
Mongolia.  I wonder if overseas contacts with SE Asia may have had a role too.

It is BTW obvious that Hangyl was not only intended as a script for Korean,
but at least also as a teaching tool for Koreans to acquire contemporary
Chinese.  Anyway I just love it, both for linguistic refinement and for its
clever acculturation of alphabetic script to Sinitic calligraphic esthetics.

have you BTW seen Sanskrit written in Hangyl?  That's real weird.  If
Sanskrit in East Asia sounded anything like it ought to -- and
transcriptions into Kana suggest it did -- then both Chinese and Korean
sounded very different from now!

> > (While we are on the subject, can you give me a pointer to a table of the
> > Galik letters?)
>
>I'm fairly sure that Nicholas Poppe's _Grammar of Classical Mongolian_ (if
>I'm remembering the exact title) has a fairly extensive treatment of all
>the Galik letters and their combinations; I can't think of anything else
>offhand.  I don't think the Mongol chapter in the _Writing Systems of the
>World_ compendium really has that information, unfortunately.
No, it doesn't! :-(

Thing is I got a sadhana print where someone has written in the Sanskrit
names (I think) of the deities in Mongolian script.  There are still some I
haven't been able to identify.





/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto:bpj@...>bpj@netg.se
<mailto:melroch@...>melroch@my-deja.com
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