Die Göttinger Sieben: Der Schatz (German Edition)
In Humboldt, aged 60, had lead an expedition from the Caspian Sea, the Ural mountains through Central Asia as far as the Altai mountains on the Chinese border. Untersuchungen zu den Gebirgsketten und zur vergleichenden Klima- tologie. Wilhelm Mahlmanns aus dem Jahr This definition has been challenged many times by Russian, German and other geographers like v. Richthofen, the later using the term Zentralasien for an area between Tibet, the Pamir, the Altai Mountains and the Khingan Mountains and bordered in the east by the system of the large streams of China proper, excluding largely what is now called Middle Asia and only including the eastern half of the area defined by Humboldt as Central Asia.
This redefinition was and is justified by the civi- lizations of the peoples living in this region. The definition of the geographic border be- tween Europe and Asia seems artificial. Defining Central Asia is an ongoing pro- cess. The Persian and the Indian cultural complex lie to the south of Central Asia. These four civilizations represent a cultural con- tinuum spanning more than two millennia. The close ties, culturally and linguistically, between the Mongolian Buryats of Siberia and other Mongolian peoples of Mongolia and elsewhere, or the Siberian Tuvans, Yakuts with Kazakhs or Kirgiz are more obvious.
Its indigenous peoples were mainly nomads and hunters, partly oasis dwellers and merchants along the Silk Road. The Silk Road encouraged the travel of art, religion, cultural elements. The swift expansion of the Mongolian empire with the Mongols appearing at the eastern borders of Germany as well as in Korea, India, China, Persia and nearly all over the Eurasian continent showed that Central Asia had no borders for the nomads. But the Mongols beyond the Central Asian steppes lost their identity soon.
The natural environment and the national and ethnic identity exist in a symbiosis. The harsh natural environment of desert, steppe, tundra and taiga form the people living there in a distinctive way, different from that in China, India or large parts of Europe that lie in the agricultural belt. Politically the empires of the steppes were short lived in comparison to the neighboring Chinese or Byzantine empires. Despite the changes in power there is no vacuum but a certain continuum of steppe empires which is only broken by the encroachment on Central Asia by the Russian and Chinese empires mainly from the 17th century onward.
Most of the indigenous peoples of Central Asia belong to the Altaic group, originally defined by languages that are related to each other within the Altaic lan- guage group, including all Mongolian, Turkic, Tungus-Manchu languages. On the southern fringe of Central Asia, especially Tajikistan and parts of Afghanistan In- do-Iranian languages prevail, and if you include Tibet you enter the Sino-Tibetan group of languages. Through its language each nation defines its own identity in the first place. As Turkic and Mongolian and Tungus-Manchurian Peoples dominated and shaped the history of Central Asia over so many centuries they left a wealth of written documents that form the basis of Central Asian studies.
A few years ago in China the entire Manchu archives for Xinjiang in facsimile volumes were pub- lished. A similar facsimile edition has been published for the area of the commandery of Hunchun covering northeastern Manchuria: And in Inner Mongolia similar editions of Mongolian archive Material are published.
The modern name Sinkiang, meaning New Territory stems from the time when in the Manchu conquered that area from the Mongols who had ruled it for centuries. And when we go back further into the history of Sinkiang we will find other peo- ples of Indo-Iranian tongues settling in that area and so many documents in an- cient languages preserved in the dry desert climate.
Not only China, but also Russia is a multi-ethnic state. Kalmykia or Buryatia are republics within Russia with large archives, holding Mongolian and other mate- rial. Much remains locked up in museums and archives. Some of these archives and oriental collections are accessible for scholars who undertake the long journey to view them. But often enough even the knowledge about these collections is not very wide spread. No network connects the thousand and more places where material years of the Qing Dynasty.
The complete Manchu Kanjur in boxes as a handmade print from the original woodblocks from is available under the shelf mark A B Today Manchu is actively only used amongst the Sibo in Ili and Sinkiang in general. The first 14 fascicles for to are mainly in Mongolian, rarely in Manchurian. Manchurian documents increase in number for later years. For the last years of this period there also appear some Tibetan documents.
The Index-Volume in Mongolian-Manchurian script provides some details as to the language of each document. Introduction 13 for the research on Central Asia is stored. This conference is another step towards making the most famous Oriental collections, be it in St.
Petersburg, in Huhehot, Szeged, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and many other places better known to more scholars. The ultimate goal should and would be, to have the links towards the websites of all collections collected on one central website, to be able to go to the online catalogues of each collection and from there on find every item, every man- uscript or print available freely in digitized form from where ever you are.
We can only make small steps into the right direction, but as can be seen in the publication of so much archive material in China over the past few years, things are moving. Talking about the drive towards digitization one cannot fail to recognize that still in most cases valuable archive material is issued in facsimilized printed vol- umes on paper rather than online. Online often seems more convenient, but then, online means that digitized material is made available from a server housed some- where in Central or East Asia maybe in a politically instable region.
Will it be online for long? Or may it be manipulated? This same problem of course applies to modern e-books and journals that may be available online from Central Asian countries. But can you rely on such online material in the long term? Is it justified to pay for the convenience of this moment without regard for future generations of scholars? These are hotly debated issues in the world of libraries today.
To understand modern Sinkiang or Inner Mongolia, Manchuria and other Cen- tral Asian regions, one has to go back to the archives and the material preserved there. In the good old days every Sinologue had to study not only the classical Chi- nese language but most scholars in East Asian studies had at least a basic knowledge of Manchu and Mongolian.
In these even better and unsurpassed mod- ern times hardly any sinologist studies Manchu or Mongolian. And how many students in the field of Turkic studies learn the Chagatai written language, once the lingua franca of Central Asia? But who of these modern scholars is going to under- stand modern Sinkiang, modern Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and so on without being able to study the old texts as well as modern literature, that often quotes the older sources in the original languages?
As my most honoured teacher Prof. Gerhard Doerfer used to say, pure linguis- tics is poor linguistics. But anyone talking of Central Asia, modern or ancient, without any philological knowledge of the languages of Central Asia will be worse off than a pure linguist, he will be just helplessly groping and stumbling in the fog. We have mentioned earlier the modern drive towards digitization and online material. But of course you can only digitize material which is already available in printed form on paper or as manuscript. So you do not get any new information by digitizing.
It is just a matter of convenience. On the other hand, so much information nowadays is found only virtually on the World Wide Web on email servers, in chatrooms, private blogs or government websites and so on. Often it is short lived and disappears unretrievably. You may put a printed book onto the shelf for a hundred years and forget it.
It will still be there a hundred years later. Not so the data stored on electronic devices. They have to be restored on new devices every ten or so years putting a great burden on libraries. And even then a certain percentage of electronic storage devices do not even survive ten years. But much of the information to be found on the internet is never stored properly in the first place.
It also includes local information issued and constantly updated and eventually deleted by local government or private organizations in Mongolia or elsewhere. Here the problem of a lack of coordination and limited funding for each project is obvi- ous. They are updated and changed regularly. Mongolian ministry of education schoolbooks etc. The large intervals are of course a problem if you want to docu- ment an ongoing exchange on Twitter or any other chatroom elsewhere.
It ar- chives the picture of a certain website at a certain moment. It does not harvest the material the links on websites lead us to. It does not offer any in depth intellectual classification of the material it sends into the archive. But it offers a certain basis on which it may be worth working on. A new development makes writing in the internet less attractive to many: Store your spoken message like an email that can be read or rather heard by the other side at any convenient moment.
The future may be digital. But the present may be the lost past of generations to come. These prayer flags are also used as offerings at sacred sites and shrines. Although the practice of hanging keyimori has spread across the whole area of greater Tibet and Mongolia, in Ordos some specific features unique to this area are worthy of mention. In earlier days, it was written as two words: The term keyimori came into wide use in the 19th century. Kei moritai — lucky, fortune. Lubsangdorji, personal interview, Prague, 31th March Lubsangdorji is Associate professor at the Department of the South and Central Asia, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, and a leading Mongolian linguist with a broad knowledge from oral traditions of Mongolian nomads.
In this case, the popular explanation adds the specific visual trait, i. The ethnic Mongolians of Ordos hung the small flag in front of the yurt, which distinguished a Mongolian family from a Chinese family. Small blue, red, white, yellow and green flags are also hung at the keyimori. This small flag was transmitted from Chinggis Khaan. Previously, in Mongolian territories, people hung only a small blue flag, be- cause blue symbolizes the sky and Mongolia. Every nationality appreciates the colors that are related to Mongolian history and life. In ancient times, the Mongolians respected the color white, which is a legacy from shamanism: The ancient Mongolian practice was to hang only these two colours — blue and white — as flags.
Following the spreading of Buddhism to Mongolia, flags of red, yellow and green colors were added, so that from this time onward, Mongolians have raised five differently colored flags. If every person worships the keyimori, that person acquires good fortune.
In addition, Mongolian people said that yellow symbolizes the land, while the green, white and red colors symbolize the grassland, the flock of sheep, flowers respectively: Regarding the materials used by Mongolians for making keyimori, two types are known: The block-print keyimori are the ones previously discussed which are used for worship on a daily basis. As for the paper keyimori, these are thrown to the wind from a high place on the first tiger day of the tiger month.
The higher the wind, the higher the flight of the paper keyimori, and this is seen as bringing good luck and good fortune. Moreover, all Mongolians remember that Chinggis Khaan ascended to the throne in a red tiger year In general daily practice, Mongolian men are the ones to burn incense, making an offering of incense every morning.
For the offering, the juniper, sandalwood, and incense are burned, along with the sacrifice of the first serving of food and drink and the blowing of a conch. No less important is the dispersion of milk tea: In order to ensure all people good luck, it is also necessary to make a full prostration of oneself before the wind horse after it has turned around three times. Here, the very largest such print contains figures of the sun, moon, horse, dragon, garuda, tiger, snow lion, the twelve animals of the Eastern zodiac, twenty-eight stars, also known as the Four Dignities, adorn each corner of the flag: I have collected images of many different block-prints from Ordos and Xin- jiang, which I would now like to describe and explicate in detail.
Images or names of four powerful animals, wish all people good luck and success in life. A preliminary survey of the keyimori in Ordos 23 Figure 2: However, the remaining iconography is the same as in the previous figure. Figure 3 Figure 3: Figure 4 Figure 4: Figure 5 Figure 5: Jo Khang Monastery, Lhasa To summarize, the Xinjiang double print is of very ancient origin, while the other examples are much more recent. What is common to these block-prints is the figu- re of a horse, four Tibetan animals and many Tibetan words and mantras, wishing all people good luck, hope for rain, appeals for health and long life and other simi- lar sentiments.
The offering of the keyimori keyimori-yin sang represents the ceremony attaching importance to the four animals and to the natural and human worlds. A preliminary survey of the keyimori in Ordos 27 2. In Ordos, riders on horseback avoid passing through the inside of the keyimori. On the one hand, the poetry associated with the ceremony of sang contains elements from shamanism and Buddhism.
The keyimori-yin sang is the poetry recited during the Mongolian offering. The keyimori-yin sang addresses both nature prayers to nature for favorable weather, etc. I have collected 16 Mongolian texts of keyimori-yin sang along with a number of texts in Tibetan.
As a result, the content of these two texts is very simple. Keyimori-yin sang texts contain many Tibetan and Sanskrit words and mantras. The keyimori-yin sang composed and edited by Mergen gegen Lubsangdambijalsan TEXT A is a prayer addressed to the Buddha through figures of a lama, hero and spirit. Many keyimori-yin sang texts have features that bear traces of high or priestly re- ligious culture. It is addressed to the human world, as a prayer for health, long life, thriving keyimori, and success in all things.
For success and luck, it is a common practice to make such prayer addresses to the owner of the grass- land and water. In the course of social development, the keyimori-yin sang has understandably changed. One crucial shift is the transfer in worship among the Mongolian people from shamanism to Buddhism. As a result, the present keyimori-yin sang has both features of shamanism and Buddhism.
Om a hum, the givers of joyous blessings who gather the spiritual powers, gracious protectors of pleasing meritorious deeds. The text asks for removal of obstacles, overcoming hardships and a smooth course of life. The above introductory text can also involve a prayer to the owner of grass- land or water, to Buddha, to pray for rain or health, long life and so on. Here, it should be noted that both shamanism and Buddhism make the offering of incense.
The above text expresses the power of the four animals of the keyimori. Originally, nomads or pastoralists hung the prayer flags in front of the house or yurt, but today, with many Mongolians living as full-time urban residents, without grassland or an open space to hang a full keyimori, the keyimori itself has been reduced in size. Most often, urban Mongolians place this small keyimori on a high place in the home or outside on the window ledge.
On the other hand, many Mongolians who live in a highly built-up area can al- so take advantage of open spaces by hanging a traditional keyimori after many per- sons make the keyimori offering together. Originally, the post of the keyimori is entirely of wood, but today iron or other materials can be used. Nowadays, many families prefer to erect two posts at the same time, each hanging four or five flags. By contrast, I remember that my family would raise only one post and had two flags only the blue and red ones only ten years ago, though now it is more common to have two posts hanging four flags blue, red, white, green, every year being different.
Still, Ordos Mongolians invariably place the post and its prayer flags in the same position: At the same time, Ordos Mongolians also continue with reading the keyimori-yin sang to the keyimori, whether cloth flags or the previously noted paper keyimori in front of the respective temple, elm or ovoo. A preliminary survey of the keyimori in Ordos has been the main research objective. My own preliminary research into the forms of the prayer flags of Mongolia and Tibet promises to yield interesting material related to the subject of religious relations between Mongolian and Tibet, a topic that could be of considerable scholarly interest providing a new angle for the study of the cultural and religious relationship between the Mongols and Tibetans.
I have noticed that characters and images on the keyimori cast an intriguing light on aspects of the rela- tions between Mongolia and Tibet. At the same time, there is the significance that the keyimori has for the Mongolian people themselves. The block-print keyimori and the texts of the keyimori-yin sang display Mongolian history through their influence by shamanism and Buddhism.
Above all, the oral keyimori-yin sang and its written text combining both Mongolian and Tibetan texts is a significant Mongolian cultural treasure. Continued study of the keyimori is important for Mongolian cul- ture as well as scholarship. A preliminary survey of the keyimori in Ordos 41 References Lubsangdorji, personal interview, Prague, 31th March Lessing, Ferdinand et col. I also like to thank our funding agency, the China Scholarship Council, for its generous support. He was born in Kalmyckia at a place called Ulan hoolai-yin hulhutu. Day and year of his birth are not known.
He then studied medicine at Man- ba Dacang with a Buryat teacher. Around he left Kalmyckia. He also became a teacher of Oirat script and writing. He must have been around 40 years old then. Amongst them are famous scholars like To. Badma a leading linguist , Si. Batubayar paper , A. Taibai later a linguist and writer and others. One of his students, To. His influence on the development of the Oirat written lan- guage was large. He collected great merits in the field of Oirat publishing and newspaper business. He was not only a Buddhist Gesi, but also a teacher and a doctor devoting his service to the common people.
The manuscript of Mongolian dialectal materials attracted the scholarly at- tention of some Hungarian and foreign researchers, but the critically revised publi- cation had been waiting for its release until the recent years the Khalkha material is still under elaboration. The linguistic value of the first large text-corpora of Vernacular Mongolian Kalmyk and Khalkha. Evaluation of the text-corpora as sources of that time ethnography, folk- lore and religious views of Kalmyks and Khalkhas. His popularity rests on his unscien- tific ideas about the affinity of the Hungarian language and certain ahistoric con- ceptions about the origin of the Hungarians.
However, at the beginning of his scientific career he produced scholarly books and unique manuscripts — unfortu- nately unpublished during his lifetime — of the highest academic value. Eastern Mongolian Khalkha texts]. When he finished the fair copy of the transcription of his field records, he was already on quite hostile terms with the leading scholars of the epoch and was in fact unacceptable and unwelcome in the scholarly spheres. So he did not succeed in finishing and issuing his material. In fact only the manuscript of the Grammar can be considered to be an entirely com- pleted one.
The manuscripts of the two text corpora of field records contain only the transcription without any explanation, analysis or translation. Hitherto I have studied in detail and published the Kalmyk records: With popular Chrestomaties [sic! The Kalmyk manuscript contains various genre groups of folkloric and ethnographic sample texts in addition some dialogues of everyday situations and some official letters as examples of vernacular and written language usage. Eastern Mongolian Khalkha texts] hereafter Khal- kha records and issued particular texts and text groups analysing them from a spe- cific point of view.
Another text group I paid special attention to is the riddle corpus in the Khalkha records. I tried to compare each items in the context of the scarce coeval materials M. I will only refer to the most essential events if it is necessary for the better understand- ing. For this purpose he visited several schools in Astrakhan and recorded the Kalmyk folk tongue September — May. Further he travelled through Siberia and became acquainted with some of the Buryat dialects.
Nonetheless, he did not publish a comprehensive Buryat material on the basis of his records or experiences. But he published a Buryat grammar on the basis of a Christian catechism written in Buryat language by Bol- donov. I must remark that my lama was no literator [sic! However, besides praising its value, I would like to draw attention to some minor problematic points of the otherwise excellent transcrip- tion. Namely the transcription of the texts does not reflect entirely all peculiarities 9 Berta Nonetheless some features of the written language are still present in it.
This dichotomous nature of his otherwise meticulously prepared system lies in all probability in the working method he elaborated for recording. His special method of collecting data among the Kalmyks can be easily restored on the basis of his notes and letters: On the basis of his remarks he mastered written Oirat quite well.
Meaning of "hierhinunter" in the German dictionary
These [tales] were written down in Kalmyk script by young Kal- myks from various tribes, some of them attended the secondary school, some the surgical school, and others the elementary school and were considered to be good story-tellers. In this way we prepared the transcription that I read out to him and corrected [the parts] in instances I had heard improperly.
The grammatical analysis and the interpretation of the tales followed thereafter. My tale collection prepared this way contains fifteen shorter and longer folk tales written down with Kalmyk letters and in an abbreviated Hungarian transcription. All the texts rec- orded from the Kalmyk tongue are transcribed in both ways [i. As some features of written Oirat still remained in the sounding texts, this makes us conclude that — while dictating the folklore texts and ethnographic narratives — his informants were not able to free themselves from the written ver- sion and in all probability inserted sounds into the spoken phonemic context that only occur in written Oirat if it is read letter by letter.
A distinguishing marker of the Kalmyk language among the Mongolian lan- guages and dialects is the strong reduction of vowels in non-initial positions, which can be indicated simply by omitting the vowel that is represented in other Mongo- lian languages. The schwa is indicated with an i in words having an i in the first or second syllable: The Oirat dialects and Kalmyk lack the primary diphthongs — represented in written Mongolian and written Oirat — and became monophthong- ised, resulting in a long vowel instead of the diphthong in non-initial position the long vowels are shortened and sound like short ones: He first asked his informants to write down their texts in Oirat script and then requested them to read them in their own dia- lect.
The presence of e in the positions of the shwa in non-initial syllables, as a kind of overshort schwa-like vowel and the use of diphthongs in positions where the Kalmyk spoken tongue has long vowels are the traces of the written language. Kara presumed that the main informant, a year-old monk, was of Western-Khalkha origin. In this case the appearance of the written forms can be excluded.
Well-known for his fluen- cy in speaking, he could not write in Mongolian but only in Tibetan, for the Mon- golian clergy find it beyond them to write, or even speak, in the language of their native folk. The Khalkha collection also contains important narratives on Buddhism.
He rather stayed in cities in Kazan, Astrakhan and Urga and worked with a limited group of informants school boys, teachers and their rela- tives in Astrakhan and with a Lama and his few fellows in Urga instead of going to the field and seeking for more herdsmen and peasants, etc. But this fact does not devaluate his immense achievements in studying the vernacular and recording the first information about vernacular folk culture in the native tongue; howev- er, it demonstrates why the contents of his records offer a limited data in some respects.
His examples of the vernacular and particularly the fables, songs and other genres con- stitute the first attempt to introduce a Mongolian dialectal spoken idiom and a folklore material. The page Kalmyk and the page Khalkha manuscripts can be con- sidered as the first larger corpora of vernacular Kalmyk and Khalkha. Birtalan , —, Kalmyk texts: Birtalan , —, Birtalan , 17—19 and Birtalan As the transcription of the texts is fairly good and accurate, these texts are proper for further linguistic research and the research of the 19th century cultural context of the languages.
As the texts were dictated by informants with different background and probably by speakers of various dialects, further research might shed light on the possible dialectal differences of particular texts, too. With Notes of Five Kalmyk Songs.
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Textkritische Neuausgabe der Originalsammlung von G. With popular Chrestomathies of both Dialects. Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, St. His Treatise on the Ritual Book of the Manchus]. It was the first version in this genre in a Turkic language and has remained the most famous one ever since. This variety marked the transition from Karakhanid Turkic in use in Eastern Turkestan from around the year A. The work is of great importance both as the most voluminous prose text in a written variety few sources for which have been preserved, and because of its great variation of different stylistic levels: It has remained the most popular work written in Eastern Turkic up to our days; copies of it were made well into the 20th century see Jarring Apart from its value for historical linguistics, including the study of the impact Arabic had on written Turkic languages, the text is also an important source for the history of Islam in Central Asia, and for the study of its genre.
There appeared some early Russian translations of single stories e. Schienkewitsch al- ready based his work on the London manuscript kept in the British Museum to- day: Our edition was shortly afterwards followed by an independent one by Ata , con- taining a transcription and a full word index. Addenda , 15th century, folia. Along with a few bits and pieces elsewhere, some 19 folia are missing between folia and Petersburg, National Library formerly: The order of the folia is in complete disarray.
B, written in The beginning up to midway the Story of Salih, part of the Abraham-cycle and the final page are missing. It is the oldest Turkic manuscript of the collection; I surmise that at the time it has escaped deportation to Sanktpeterburg only because of its relatively poor physical appearance. Basically complete, but for some folios at the beginning and at the end that were added later; the final page is lacking altogether.
Hofman mentions a manuscript in Teh- ran, but has no further information about it. Petersburg, Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences no. C, written around Some pages which had been lost were added later. Of these manuscripts, those from Baku and Tehran had not been considered in our first edition; copies of them were acquired a few years ago. These manuscripts belong to the old layer of manuscripts — old meaning that they are from the 16— 17th century, i. There are many more manuscripts, but these are from the 18th century and later, with the exception of two manuscripts kept in Tashkent: Archaisms in the Tehran ms.
In contrast, the Tehran manuscript exhibits some archaic features even as com- pared to the passages in which some of the copyists at work in the London manu- script show certain archaic tendencies cf. Two redactions On the basis of the manuscripts at our disposal it becomes clear that two redac- tions are reflected in them.
The ques- tion now arises: Do the manuscripts from Tehran ms. T and from the Russian Academy ms. C contain additions, or were the sections deleted from the British library ms. A , Russian National Library ms. B and Baku ms. As yet this is impossible to decide; in our forthcoming edition that is primarily based on the London manuscript we added the relevant chapters from the Tehran manu- script.
Of course it is also conceivable that even more material is included in other manuscripts. In any case the differences in content are up to a point matched by textual characteristics. Ba more often than not agree in passages where the manuscripts overall diverge, and so do ms. C to a lesser extent, but in that case there can be assumed a larger gap in time between their datings. The language features of ms. A are diffuse, because it is a convolute to which no less than seven scribes contributed cf.
This last circumstance is an indication that the London manuscript was produced at a copying shop. The haste with which the work was executed is reflected in numerous inconsistencies in the texts: Because we drew upon the other manuscript for corrections, our edition often have a cer- tain patchwork quality, as exemplified by the following two passages1: I refer to our edition for a fuller presentation.
When the eagles were fully grown, Nimrod had a box made with two doors, one door on top and one underneath. And the box had eight legs, four on top and four below. Nimrod had the eagles chained to the legs on top. When the birds saw the meat above them, they tried to catch it and flew off, raising the box into the air.
Conclusion Considering the somewhat messy state of the London manuscript, one may ask why we did not use the one manuscript as a basic text that is almost complete, overall more coherent and possible even older, i. The answer is manifold. First, we had the first edition available on which our second edition is based. This text and the translation still needed many corrections, and we present them in the new edition. Secondly, the narrative in the Tehran manuscript also is faulty in many places, and often the narrative as such deviates from the text in ms. So we stuck to ms. A as the basis for our edition, and left a possible edi- tion of the Tehran manuscript certainly a desideratum to others.
Text edition with S. Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Literaturgeschichte. The Making of the Pentaglot: Concepts, Data Structures and Tools Oliver Corff Berlin 1 Abstract The realization of the Pentaglot Project Wuti qingwenjian , the modern critical edi- tion1 of the famous Qing Dynasty multi-lingual dictionary, required elaborated concepts covering fields as diverse and unrelated to Altaic studies as project man- agement, data processing and formal logic.
Meaning of "Sackerl" in the German dictionary
In light of the five languages comprised in the Pentaglot namely Manju, Tibetan, Mongolian, Turki and Chinese , data encoding and representation become crucial for properly processing and visualiz- ing lexical material. The scholarly requirements of critical editions were to be con- sidered as well. The article sets the focus on the importance of fundamental work- ing principles established at the very beginning of the project, and key components of open-source software will be introduced. The languages include in order of the dic- tionary Manju, Tibetan lemmata in Tibetan script with two auxiliary notations in Manju, a very detailed transliteration as well as a transcription , Mongolian, Turki lemmata in Arabic script with an auxiliary pronunciation guide in Manju, though not to be considered a systematic transcription , and Chinese.
Unfortunately, this work was never printed, but three manuscripts survive of which two were repro- duced in the 20th century. The three manuscripts share the same lexicon except for a few minor differences and the same arrangement of lemmata again except for very few differences , yet differ widely in copy quality. Mistakes, errors and omissions are abundant in the Chonghuagong-Ms. Its calligraphy has been executed in superb quality on the finest paper, errors, be they spelling or lexical errors, are virtually completely purged, but nonetheless even this version did not yet seem fit to print as occasionally inserted small yellow slips of paper with suggestions for a different choice of words hint.
The magnitude of the Pentaglot dictionary can be outlined by a few figures. With 36 fascicles totalling more than 2, folia or around 5, pages, a total of 18, lemmata, each lemma being composed of five languages distributed over eight lines, employing four essentially different writing systems with three different directional orientations, the Pentaglot is a massive work well comparable in size and complexity with modern comprehensive dictionaries representing an effort which must have taken dozens of man-years to complete. Despite this impressive investment of brain and manpower, the Pentaglot was never printed and distributed.
In general, dictionaries of this era could be arranged in an alphabetical order if Manju was the dominant or only language, or otherwise an elaborated semantical classification system of entries was used, as in the case of the Pentaglot. Concepts, Data Structures and Tools 75 vidual categories until the desired entry is found. The Pentaglot manuscripts do not even have a comprehensive table of contents.
Only the London manuscript is readily available for autopsy; it displays the categories on the cover of each fascicle in Manju and Chinese. The Pentaglot Project was the name chosen in the late s for the endeav- our to produce a fully romanized critical edition of this monument. A comprehen- sive index system for all languages was as much a desideratum as the careful cor- rection of some of the most visible technical errors e.
The Chi- nese material had to be accompanied by a reading aid Hanyu Pinyin in order to distinguish between different meanings of homographs, and a translation into a modern language was considered helpful as well. Given the inherent ambiguity of the Mongolian writing system, a Khalkha gloss was also added. A cross-referencing system combining the classification system of the main part fasc. More than 15 years passed between the first experimental data collection and the publication of the critical edition in as well as five index volumes in Control of mental focus and proofreading would be impos- sible while the number of work-induced errors would be overwhelming.
The only way, then, was to analyse the Pentaglot and to treat it as a database, allowing to divide labour between humans, e. Maintaining focus on a given task at a given time was considered a key factor of achieving editorial quality. A very simple structure had to be designed which would allow co-authors to collaborate while being separated by time and geography.
For every language, a simple, straight-forward text file was constructed, thus even eliminating the need for a common database software. Any text editor the individual author felt com- fortable with was deemed fit for work. A minimum of structural information had to be included in every text file in order to construct the proper relations between all files and lines, a simple line structure was set up. Every line, containing exactly one entry, consists of two parts: The structural information part consists of three fields: Fields are separated by tab stops. The textual information part is split into three fields, all of them optional: All text fields are of variable length which can be zero, representing an empty field and are separated by semicolon.
Occasionally, there are missing entries in the Pentaglot manuscripts and thus the first field can be empty. In this case, the sec- ond field contains the intended word. Two practical examples drawn from Manju and Tibetan in Manju transcription look as follows. The first line demonstrates how an error in the text is corrected, and the second line shows how a missing entry is completed. In this example, The exclamation mark indicates the editorial status and signals that the entry is completed.
A question mark would mark the entry as unfinished. Thus it becomes possible to quickly search for those entries which need reworking as the author simply places a question mark in this position. Concepts, Data Structures and Tools 77 Textual information: In the first example, the Chonghuagong Ms. In the second example, the empty space before the first semicolon indicates the absence of an entry at this position, while the second field provides the word which should go there, followed by a short comment.
A regular line featuring neither suggested normalized form nor comment looks like this: There are eleven such files, one for Manju xxxx. A master file containing all page and column references of all manuscripts as well as the Chinese names of all sections and subsections served as organizational hub against which the eleven language files were linked like spokes of a wheel: All information necessary to produce a printable typoscript with complete markup is contained in these two groups of files: Pages are referenced by common page num- bers, headings for the table of contents and page headers are provided by the vari- ous [bu] and [lei] type entries, formatting is controlled accordingly, and the com- ment columns of the textual information, if present, are converted into footnotes.
No single human intervention is necessary for choosing the correct formatting markup if everything is set up properly. Descriptive and normative word forms; Tibetan alphabet vs. Manju transliteration; Turki word counts; showing everything 4. A few examples are given here. The Tibetan entry in Literally hundreds of mistakes in the Tibetan fields were discovered by simple and automated comparison of the Tibetan text and transliteration fields. An interesting challenge was found in the different word count of Turki in Ar- abic script and Turki in Manju transcription.
A survey of the transcription revealed that there are several hiatus types in the Turki transcription which stand for certain Turki pronunciations in a very sys- tematical manner; similarly, spelling variants could be identified and distinguished from simple copy errors. Other words appear regularly in two or three different spellings of similar frequen- cy; here we cannot speak of errors but must accept the variation.
Comparisons or differences of data sets are also possible and feasible across languages. By matching identical parts of speech, e. Manju verbs finite forms ending in -mbi vs. Clearly, the Manju word is not a verb while the Mongolian word is a finite verb. The problem here is that the Mongolian scribe forgot the word which was intended in this position xorsiyal should go here , shifting the following odd entries up by one column.
SACKERL - Definition and synonyms of Sackerl in the German dictionary
Concepts, Data Structures and Tools 79 This case was discovered by the following search expressed in program- ming meta-language: Taking again the Tibetan example in position The Tibetan data line simplified for the sake of clarity reads: One additional file contains all those annotations which are not specific to one single language but refer to the whole lemma as such e.
This file employs the same principle as the eleven language files: The header uses the same familiar xxxx. All files are read by a custom-made utility program which produces the files from which the typesetting system generates the PDF output. Besides these input files where all language material and organizational information is merged into one common structure, the typesetting system uses additional files containing detailed formatting instructions, image files containing the reproductions of small portions of the Chonghuagong manuscript in most cases images of single words , all fonts as well as a collection of approximately 1, user-defined Chinese characters for the careful reproduction of the Chinese text.
While all other scripts in the Pentaglot could be represented by Latin translations, Chinese was the single exception. In the beginning, Big5 seemed to be the encoding of choice as it offered a greater choice of traditional characters than the GB standard of the People's Republic of China. As soon however as editors with practical handling capabilities for Unicode material ap- peared, all material compiled so far was converted to Unicode.
Still, not one single font is enough to fully represent all character varieties found in the Pentaglot man- uscripts; characters from three or four fonts were helpful for a small number of varieties, but for the bulk of yitizi new characters had to be made as graphical rep- resentations. Some of those characters were later discovered to be included in the Unicode extensions A and B of the CJK block, but at that point it was considered safer for the technical production to stick with the chosen path of including indi- vidual yitizi as vector graphics.
The romanization of the Arabic alphabet was chosen in such a way that two possible outputs via two different conversion paths could be computer-generated from a single file. In this manner, a full convertability between the romanization in the critical edition and the original Arabic material is guaranteed. Concepts, Data Structures and Tools 81 5. Besides the strict line orientation with optional line numbering, it features a powerful regular expression engine allowing complex search and replace operations.
It also features the synchronized side-by-side display of files with automated highlighting of all differences, a feature extremely useful for tracking one's own editing history by comparing older and younger versions of a file or by tracking the work of two persons working on the same file.
The user interface of vim works without mouse, allowing the operator to keep the hands on the keyboard at all times; this ergonomical factor contributes signifi- cantly to a smaller error rate since switching between keyboard and mouse as well as moving the focus of attention between hand, keyboard, mouse and screen is not required. All utility programs for analyzing data and generating output from combined files were written in Perl.
Perl found at www. The image manipulation operations automated cutting, resizing, etc. All these software tools have the common advantage of being freely and legally available. They are accompanied by extremely detailed documentation, and there is a huge community of experienced users in academia who voluntarily answer ques- tions and contribute to solving individual problems.
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All data files had to be organized in such a manner that every contributor could work independently of all others and ideally also independently of specific software requirements. A rigid separation was made between data and presenta- tion. The data files do not contain any presentation vulgo: The purpose of the rigid separation between the ca- pabilities of man and machine is two-fold. A formal analysis of the Pentaglot text reveals a logical organization of the ma- terial well suited for the transformation into a relational database; a hub-and-spoke concept was used for relating all languages files to a single master file the structural information of which is used for controlling the appearance of everything.
A very simple data comparison model essentially yielding differences between sets of similar data was used for a multitude of tasks: The same comparison operation also produced the markup for the more than 15, individually annotated spelling variants and errors found in the text. All software tools employed for producing the camera-ready copy of the criti- cal edition of the Pentaglot are open-source tools accompanied by detailed docu- mentation and supported by a broad user base familiar with the requirements of the academic community.
The most important goal of organizing the production process in the manner outlined above was to avoid frustration by allowing all contributors to concentrate on the text rather than forcing them to waste time and energy on an error-prone production process. Acknowledgments I like to thank my colleagues for their optimism and unbreakable spirit of endur- ance during so many years of patient labour against all odds and towards a goal that must have appeared so far away at too many moments in time.
Working to- gether over so many years was a wonderful experience! Chinese sources on the modern history of Xinjiang: Kash- gar in the Twentieth Century. As the articles in the wenshi ziliao series are based largely on individual recollections and oral testimonies, its use raises interesting and important questions on the reliability and value of this kind of material as a historical source. These books are only available in Chinese and no complete or even partial translations are available.
Selections for provinces or for China as a whole are more widely available. To read the Kashgar series it was necessary to use scanned versions which had been preserved and transmitted electronically. These volumes were not intended to be read outside China, hence the neibu classification: Kashgar in the Twentieth Century London: The continuing existence of the city and its distinctive cultural features, which are preserved to some extent as a magnet for foreign tour- ists, are a constant reminder of the fact, uncomfortable for some, that the vast region of Xinjiang on the frontiers of the Chinese empire is a disputed territory in which some regions have an overwhelming non-Chinese, that is non-Han, majority.
Although it is possible to generalise about the modern history of Xinjiang, it is important to bear in mind that the region as a whole occupies an area almost three times the size of France and is home to a widely scattered population. Communi- cations between the different regions of Xinjiang are poor even today and were poorer still in the period under scrutiny in this paper.
The north and south of the region are separated by the Taklamakan Desert, a western extension of the vast and inhospitable Gobi, and the consequence of this separation has, not surprising- ly, resulted in distinctive cultures and historical traditions. There is a parallel series of volumes in the Uyghur language, Shinjang tarikh materiyalliri. Xinjiang historical materials published irregularly from onwards but to date it has not been possible to obtain a complete set of those relating to Kashgar and its region. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations.
Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity individual or corporate has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public.
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