“The Stone Inscription” (Čilaγun-u bičig) in Cyrillic renderings of a recited Oirat oral literary version
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Prof. J. Lubsangdorji and Prof. J. Vacek in their publication Čila?un-u bičig (1997) provided a careful linguistic analysis of one manuscript of the so called “Stone Inscription” written in the Classical Mongolian script and slightly alternating orthography, a Mongolian prophetic text of Chinese origin predicting disasters of the approaching end of the current kalpa and giving instructions on how to avoid them. They concluded that the manuscript shows a significant influence of the oral literary language, a special mode of pronouncing the Classical Mongolian, standing between the spelling of classical orthography and the colloquial language of the time. The “Stone Inscription” became one of the most spontaneously circulated and copied texts at the end of the 19th and in the first decades of the 20th century Mongolia. This widespread popularization enabled forms of the spoken language and unique writing habits of each scribe penetrate the manuscripts. The “Stone Inscription” became equally popular also in Western Mongolia, where it was recorded using the Clear Script. In 1967, among the Oirat dialect variety speaking Altai Uriankhais of Ulaankhus Bag, Bulgan Sum, Bayan-Ölgii Province, an old lama Damdin recited the “Stone Inscription” originally written by the Clear Script to a group of young women who knew only the basics of the Cyrillic alphabet. The young ladies recorded the recitation of this archaic text exactly according to their own perception of the recitation and in this way created a valuable document of the now extinct oral pronunciation of literary Oirat. This paper will introduce the historical and cultural context of this source and analyse it as an example of blending several registers of two dialects of Mongolian - written orthography of the Literary Oirat, oral pronunciation of the Literary Oirat, Altai Uriankhai colloquial dialect and the modern Cyrillic Mongolian orthography based on the colloquial Khalkha Mongolian. |
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