Book Review: "Dictionary of Sonom Gara's Erdeni-Yin Sang: A Middle Mongol Version of the Tibetan Sa Skya Legs Bshad. Mongol—English—Tibetan – By Görgy Kara with the assistance of Marta Kiripolská"
DICTIONARY OF SONOM GARA'S ERDENI-YIN SANG: A MIDDLE MONGOL VERSION OF THE TIBETAN SA SKYA LEGS BSHAD. MONGOL—ENGLISH—TIBETAN . By Görgy Kara with the assistance of Marta Kiripolská . Brill's Inner Asian Library, Vol. 23 . Leiden : Brill , 2009 . Pp . xxix-337 . $177.00 .
摘要
This excellent edition of the first complete dictionary of the earliest Mongol guide to ethical living, Sa skya Legs bshad, compiled by the renowned Tibetan scholar, Sa skya Pandita, is based on L. Ligeti's facsimile edition of the Kharachin manuscript from the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and his Index Verborum. Although relatively small, this dictionary is indispensable for the study of the methods and history of translations from Tibetan into Mongolian. In this edition, words transcribed from the Uygur script and Qubilai's Square Script are listed together with their English versions and origin. Kara's edition also includes the entire vocabulary of several other texts of the fourteenth century, and it offers parallel readings from the seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century Mongolian translations. Giving a historical perspective on Mongolian techniques of translation, it facilitates a more accurate reading of secular and Buddhist literary works abounding in Middle Mongolian lexicon and forms. Kara's learned introduction discusses the strophic structure, orthography, phonetics, lexicon, and grammar of Sonom Gara's language, and shows inconsistencies between the Tibetan and Middle Mongolian versions. This dictionary will greatly benefit both Mongolian language scholars and scholars of Buddhism seeking to make sense of Mongolian translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts.
