| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
Fiscal Year 1993: ¥300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 1992: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In this project I tried to search for and publish the so far unpublished Sogdian and other Middle Iranian materials scattered all over the world, because it is the very first step one must take in order to undertake the above mentioned research. A complete catalog of the Middle Iranian mss. from the Otani Collection was prepared, which was obtained by the Otani Expedition and is now housed at the Ryukoku University Library. Some fragments from the collection were edited together with one recently discovered in China and a few others preserved in Berlin. All these fragments contain a Parthian hymn dedicated to the Third Messenger of the Manichaean pantheon.
Chinese elements incorporated into the Sogdian language were collected exhaustively and investigated from the linguistic point of view. It is clear now that in spite of long contact between the two peoples, very few Chinese words settled themselves in the Sogdian language. Apart from that two Buddhist Chinese texts transcribed in Sogd
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ian script were published and the pronunciation of Chinese characters underlying the Sogdian transcription was compared with the Middle Chinese reconstructed by Sinologists. This study reveals that one text dates back to the first half of the eighth century, while the other the tenth century.
Three long letters in Sogdian were unearthed in Bezeklik in 1980. These letters, which were diciphered by me, are written in late cursive script and contain many Old Turkish (= Unighur) elements, the syntax of the language betraying strong Uighur influence. Some other documents of similar character were discovered in Dunhuang and shown to go back to the tenth century. In the light of these facts I now assume that Uighurs employed Sogdian as their written language during the tenth century. I am now preparing a book, in which the three letters are edited and the language contact between Sogdian and Unighur is investigated.
In the last two years I assembled all the Sanskrit and Prakrit words attested in the hitherto published Sogdian texts and compiled an alphabetical list. Linguistic research into these Indian elements will be undertaken in the near future.
The most unexpected result of the research was that I was able to discover one passage in a Buddhist Sogdian text which has a close parallel in an Uighur text. The latter text is believed to have been translated from Tocharian, and the Sogdian text seems to be the independent translation from the same original. This discovery raises an intriguing question concerning the relationship between Sogdian and Tocharian. Less
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