Written Mongolian

The monograph deals with the linguistic and historical study of the inscriptions on two 15th-century steles from Tyr cliff in the Lower Amur (now they are kept in V. K. Arsenyev Primorye State Museum in Vladivostok) with texts in Chinese, Jurchen, Mongolian (the 1413 stele), and in Chinese only (the 1433 stele). The present book is an attempt to make the first full translation of all texts of the Tyr steles into Russian with an extensive philological and historical commentary, indices, and illustrations. A new reconstruction of all the texts of two steles was performed from their plates and photos as well as on the basis of their earlier research. The comparative analysis of the texts made by the authors enabled them to make some conclusions which are important for the textual study of the monuments. The results are significant both for linguistics (the steles are unique evidence of language contacts in the Far East in the Middle Ages) and for the history and ethnography (the monuments contain important information about the Ming China policy towards the peoples of the Lower Amur, and a large number of ethnic and geographical names).

The paper deals with the Preclassical Mongol inscription on the 1413 Tyr stele, now kept at Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). It contains the 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 grammatical structure of words and sentences. The author tries to demonstrate the importance of this conclusion for decipherment or tentative reconstruction of some missing and previously illegible parts of the Mongol inscription. The new reading of lines 2 and 3 of the Mongol inscription proposed in the paper is based on thorough comparison of lacunae in the Mongol text with the corresponding parts of the Jurchen one which are preserved in better condition, as combined with a more careful investigation of all the existing photos and rubbings of the inscription , especially old photos of the monument kept among A. M. Pozdneev's materials in the Archives of the Institute for Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg). The overall results demonstrate a substantial progress in reading the Mongol inscription as compared to previous scholarly works on the subject.

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 paper addresses some peculiarities of affricates in Middle Mongol (13th–16th centuries) as related to the problem of reconstructing the (Pre)-Proto-Mongolic consonant system. Three peculiarities of Middle Mongol affricates are highlighted: (1) fluctuation between č and ǰ; (2) alliteration of the type č–ǰ or ǰ–č; and (3) underdifferentiation of the medial č and ǰ in Uighur-Mongol script. Examples of the non-distinctive use of affricates in modern Mongolic languages such as those spoken in Qinghai and Gansu Provinces (Eastern Yugur and Shirongol) and the languages of the Central Mongolic Group (Khalkha, Buryat, Kalmyk) are provided as well. The paper concludes that in Proto-Mongolic, the distinction between *č and *ǰ may have been phonemic, while at the Pre-Proto-Mongolic stage, *č and *ǰ were presumably free-variant allophones of the same consonant phoneme **C. This reconstruction seems to be confirmed by the evidence from Khitan, where the fluctuation between the segments <c> and <dz> probably dates back to the Pre-Proto-Mongolic stage.