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

On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, BP Jonsson wrote:

> 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.
I didn't know about that -- or that the same person who did the Vagintara
script also was responsible for the Cyrillic orthography of Mongol (I had
heard that Poppe and other Soviet scholars came up with it, with
Zhamtsarano (?) or Damdinsuren (?).

> >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.
Really?  What language is that?  I must have missed it, but I'd love to
hear about it!

> >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.
I wouldn't rule it out either, but it does seem considerably less likely,
given that 15th-ct. Korea was fairly cut off from dealings with the
Chinese court, while it's known to have continued training people in
Mongolian and 'phags-pa script up through the end of the 14th ct. (IIRC).

> 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!
No doubt :)  On the other hand, Sanskrit definitely could get pretty
warped as it was adopted into some of those northernmost languages (e.g.,
Skt punya -> Mongol buyan)

> 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.
Well, if you can get me an image of it, I'd enjoy giving it a try -- I can
also see if Jim Bosson can make any sense out of it, since he's here right
now.

Kenji