At 11:38 17.4.2000 -0400, Kenji Schwarz wrote:
>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 (?).

The name was Samtsuren -- probably the same person as Zhamtsarano.  (I got
the info from Poppe, IIRC, and it is only natural if he wanted to downplay
his own rôle.)

> > >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!

Well, check out his page about Charyan script, and you'll see!  It's a
twist to it...

>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).

I didn't know that!

> > 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)

Or padma -> pE:ma, vajra -> bendzire in demotic Tibetan.  Anyway the
Koreans seem to be consistently using _m_ for _v_ and _n_ for _l_ and _r_,
and the old Hangyl character looking like a Greek Delta for _ñ_, while _mb_
and _nd_ are used for the Sanskrit plain nasals as well as Sanskrit _mb_,
_nd_.  I know the Chinese rime tables seem to have used a similar
rendering, but given the relatively high quality of contemporary documents
written in Siddham in both Korea and japan it is really strange!


> > 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.

I tried to scan some pages of the book.  Since it is already a photocopy of
a not-to-good print the results are measly.  I can transcribe the Tibetan
names and what I think the Mongolian spellings look like, tho.




/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]
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