2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Influences of the Buddhist Mongolian upon the formation of the Written Mongolian
Project/Area Number |
16520244
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Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
Section | 一般 |
Research Field |
Linguistics
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Research Institution | Ehime University |
Principal Investigator |
HIGUCHI Koichi Ehime University, Faculty of Law and Letters, Professor, 法文学部, 教授 (20156574)
|
Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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Keywords | Mongolian Buddhist Literature / the Written Mongolian / the Buddhist Mongolian |
Research Abstract |
The Head Investigator has an insight through the long-tem studies on the Mongolian Buddhist Literature in view of Linguistics and Philology to the effect that the Buddhist Mongolian, which is defined as the Language with which the Tibetan originals were translated into Mongolian, was a great motive to the formation of the Written Mongolian, which had been till the first decade of the last century and partly has been now used as an official language with which any documents in Mongolian are written. The Buddhist Mongolian had been into use slightly after the first introduction of the Tibetan Buddhism into the Mongols of the 13th century. This study was developed under the insight. Through minute research of the secular literature after the establishment of the Yuan dynasty in 1269 we find that the forms and expressions which had been firstly used in the Mongolian translations of the Tibetan originals were widespread in the secular literature. This cannot be found in any colloquial literature including the Secret History of the Mongols, which was written in Chinese characters in order to transcript the contemporary Mongolian, and so on. This fact leads us to presume that the Written Mongolian and the colloquial one were of the different character although the both can be labeled as Mongolian Language. Such difference was maintained even after the second introduction of the Tibetan Buddhism in the late 17th century.' The tendencies that language contacts are the great motive of the formation of the written can be witnessed in other parts of the world, of which the typical case was Gothic in the German world, and now we can find it in the Mongolian world. This finding will be reported in the International Congress of Humanities of Asia and North Africa to be held in Ankara this September.
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