BL Mongolic

Mongolian Cyrillic — *From first page of Isaak J. Schmidt’s polyglot dictionary*

The expansion of the Russian Empire’s frontiers toward Manchu China meant interactions with several different Mongolic language groups that inhabit Siberia and the Far East, including Buryat and Oirat variants. The official Khalka dialect is prominent in the Republic of Mongolia. The 19th-century digitized book presented here is one of the earliest dictionaries of Mongolian language that was published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. We are highlighting this specific dictionary in consultation with the faculty members that teach and conduct their research in Mongolian. The scripts of the Mongolian language have evolved over the long history of the Mongols. Due to the Sovietization of Outer Mongolia, the alphabet was changed to Cyrillic characters (Khalkha) while the Inner Mongolia of the People’s Republic of China continued to use a variant of the traditional script which is called Uyghur-Mongolian.

Several UCB faculty members focus their research on Mongolia. Among them is Professor Emerita Patricia Berger, an art historian, and Professor Jacob Dalton, who is a world known specialist on Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism’s history and practice are syncretic to both past and present practice to the Buddhism of Mongolia. Brian Baumann is a lecturer of Mongolian language in East Asian Languages and Cultures and is instrumental in teaching language courses. Professor Sanjyot Mehendale, who teaches courses on Central Asia and the Silk Roads in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, is an archaeologist specializing in Eurasian trade and cultural exchange of the early Common Era. She has worked on several archaeology sites and projects in Central Asia, including Samarkand and Afghanistan.

The Mongolia collection has been developed to reconnect students with the history of Mongolia and the surrounding region. Besides students, the collection development revolves around the needs of faculty members and other scholars at UC Berkeley. Mongolia’s ethnic composition represents a unique tapestry of the Central Asian nationalities living within the geographic boundaries of the region along with the Mongols. The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures offers courses related to Mongolia which vary from elementary Mongolian to Mongolian Buddhist Ritual (Buddhist Studies 190).^[1]While the collection of Mongolian language books from the Republic of Mongolia printed in Cyrillic is approximately 1800 titles, Doe Library acquired nearly 800 new titles from 2009 through 2019. Besides, Mongolian language materials, we also have an extensive collection of books in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek languages.

As a librarian for East European and Central Asian Studies, I focused initially on collecting materials related to Buryat Mongols of Siberia. With a generous gift from the government of Mongolia, UC Berkeley and the Institute of East Asian Studies were delighted to announce the establishment of the Mongolia Initiative. This initiative led to the beginning of the teaching of Mongolian on campus for the first time in many years. Thus, the need for the collections of materials in Mongolian from the Republic of Mongolia became an ever-pressing reality. Since 2015, UC Berkeley has also received funding from the U.S. Department of Education to begin teaching elementary Mongolian. This National Resource Center grant recognizes UC Berkeley as a national leader for teaching and research on East Asia, including Mongolia.^[2] It funds the education of lesser-taught world languages, in particular Mongolian, which is one of the critical languages for the national security of the United States government.^[3]

Contribution by Liladhar Pendse
Librarian for the Mongolian Collections, Doe Library

Sources consulted:

Mongolian (MONGLN) Berkeley Academic Guide – UCB (accessed 6/24/19)
About the Mongolia Initiative, UC Berkeley (accessed 6/24/19)
Languages of Interest, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (accessed 6/24/19)

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Title: Mongolisch-deutsch-russisches Wörterbuch : Nebst Einem Deutschen Und Einem Russischen Wortregister =: Mongolʹsko-ni︠e︡met︠s︡ko-rossīĭskīĭ Slovar : S Prisovokuplenīem Ni︠e︡met︠s︡kago I Russkago Alfavitnykh Spiskov.
Title in English: Mongolian-German-Russian Dictionary: In addition to a German and a Russian word index.
Author: Schmidt, Isaak Jakob, 1779-1847.
Imprint: Sanktpeterburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1835.
Edition: 1st.
Language: Mongolian Cyrillic (Khalkha)
Language Family: Mongolic
Source: HathiTrust Digital Library (UCLA)
URL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.d0006851489

Other online editions:

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB)
http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10691089-1

Print editions at Berkeley:

Schmidt, Isaak J. Mongolisch-deutsch-russisches Wörterbuch: Nebst Einem Deutschen Und Einem Rusischen Wortregister. St. Petersburg: Bei den commissionairen der Kaiserlichen akademie der wissenschaften, W. Graeff und Glasunow, 1835.

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The Thousand Character Classic (Chinese: 千字文), also known as the Thousand Character Text, is one of the earliest and most widespread basic literacy texts for the study of classical Chinese. The rhyming text was composed by learned and talented scholar Zhou Xingsi of the Southern Liang dynasty (502-557) and has been used ever since as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children. It contains exactly one thousand non-redundant characters arranged into 250 four-character couplets. Not only is the form succinct and poetic, but the text also imparts traditional Chinese knowledge and wisdom. It was widely circulated in ancient Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. It has also been translated into several western languages, including English, Latin, German, Italian, and French. The New Mongolian Translation of the Thousand Character Classic contains traditional Uyghur-Mongolian and Chinese text, as well as Manchu phonetic transcription. It is valuable for the study of Mongolian and Manchu phonology. The C.V. Starr East Asian Library owns a facsimile of the 1907 stone print edition. The original edition is held by the Harvard-Yenching Library and was recently digitized.

The course description for Mongolian 1A follows: “Mongolian is the language of a people who politically have emerged on the world stage after verily hundreds of years of imposed isolation, who geographically live on the vast open steppe that ranges from the Gobi to Siberia, who economically juggle an ancient tradition of pastoral nomadism with the development of national and private industry, who culturally know an eclectic, vibrant cosmopolitanism belied by their rugged open spaces, and who long ago established the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known.”^[1]UC Berkeley has a long tradition of Mongolian Studies reaching back to the early 20th century. In 1935, Ferdinand Lessing, a German scholar of Central Asia, was named the fourth Agassiz Professor of East Asian Studies and established this country’s first course in the Mongolian language, as well as courses on Mongolia’s Buddhist tradition. He also published the first scholarly Mongolian-English dictionary in 1960.^[2]Mongolian studies continued to advance under the direction of Professor James Bosson, who taught at Berkeley from 1964 through 1996. He was also a renowned scholar for the Manchu and Tibetan languages. Students at Berkeley begin with Khalkha Mongolian, the standard language of Mongolia, in its context as a dialect of Mongolian language proper using Cyrillic script and introducing traditional script. They then advance to Literary Mongolian, its phonetics, grammar, vertical writing system and its relation to living spoken language.

With a generous gift from the government of Mongolia, UC Berkeley and the Institute of East Asian Studies launched the Mongolia Initiative in 2016. Mongolian is now being taught on campus for the first time in many years by Professor Brian Baumann who concentrates on Mongolian texts on Buddhism, history and culture. Funding from the U.S. Department of Education has also supported the language program and other research activities on Mongoliat as well as for enrichment of the Mongolian collection in the Library.

Contribution by Jianye He
Librarian for the Chinese Collections, C.V. Starr East Asian Library

Sources consulted

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Title: 新譯蒙漢千字文 = Sin-e orčiγuluγsan mongγol irgen mingγan üsüg bui
Title in English: The New Mongolian Translation of the Thousand Character Classic
Author: Zhou, Xingsi, d. 521.
Imprint: Beijing : Zhen bei shi yin guan, Guangxu ding wei, 1907.
Edition: n/a
Language: Mongolian
Language Family: Mongolic
Source: Harvard College Library Harvard-Yenching Library
URL: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:10443432

Print editions at Berkeley:

Facsimile reprint has been published in volume one of 清代蒙古文啓蒙讀物薈萃 = Qing dai Menggu wen qi meng du wu hui cui. Huhehaote Shi : Yuan fang chu ban she, 2016.

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