"Jose Card Dima, Agri - Ada Cloth" Dictionary Of Mongolian Studies

Muqaddimat al-Adab is one of the most important documents, in which the middle Mongolian words were transcribed with Arabic script. Its spelling characteristics do not totally correspond with that of the Uyghuric mongol script. It mainly expressed the dialectal and areal features. At this point, it is of great value. It can provide us with the materials of middle Mongolian and let us see through the true aspects of it. From the morphological point of view, it has many morphological features that are not present in modern Mongolian and other old Mongolian documents. On the other hand, it clearly reflects the influence of Turkic, Persian and Arabic languages. By studying these linguistic influences, we can speculate the life of central Asian Mongols of that time. From the syntactic point of view, the double verb converbs and unusual orders of sentence elements do not appear in other old Mongolian documents. From the point of semantics, the meaning of autochthonic Mongolian words is very rich. In this dictionary we can see many compound words that are not available in modern Mongolian and other documents. Therefore it has very high value in studying the development of Mongolian words.Since it was written in Arabic script and studied lately, the pace of the progress that was made by the foreign and Chinese scholars was slow, and the achievements are few. It was first discovered by Nicholas Poppe and published by him. Since he applied his own subjective ideas in transcription, the original features of the old language were missed. Now we use the new transcription of Japanese scholar Prof. Saito (2008) and systematically analyze the linguistic feature of Muqaddimat al-Adab.This paper consists of six parts; they are preface, four main chapters and summary.Chapter one ’Writing System and Phonology’ includes vowels, long vowels, diphthongs, consonants, sound harmony, sound changes, and coherent effect of sound changes etc.In this chapter, through describing and discussing some phonological matters in Muqaddimat al-Adab, I explained some phonological phenomenon and brought forward some ideas. They are:labial harmony of Mongolian vowels was not completely formed; The process of the formation of long vowels in different words is not totally same, it has three forms; The weakening of the sounds was not merely expressed as the weakening or stressing of the sounds; the weakening and dropping of the phonemes in words were begun since very early times; the weakening and dropping of the phonemes should meet some requirements; the concept and meaning of the replacement of the sounds in Mongolian is a little different from that of the western linguistics, and the replacement should meet some requirements; Mongolian has consonant increasing phenomenon at the onset of the words, and the increased consonants correspond with the onset phonemes of other words; Mongolian has synaeresis phenomenon; different types of sound changes were related with each other, and caused to some phonological changes in modern and old Mongolian.Chapter two’Word Formation’ includes word structure, morphological word formation, syntactic word formation and the formation of vocabularies etc. In this chapter, I classified the suffixes and explained their meaning.In chapter three ’Morphology’, I classified the words in Muqaddimat al-Adab as nine classes. They are nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns, place words, verbs, adverbs, postpositions and onomatopoeic words. I analyzed more emphatically the case, plural and possessive suffixes of the nouns, the grade category of the adjectives and the tense and aspect categories of the verbs. I put forward the idea that the Mongolian case suffixes had been simplifying at that time.Chapter four ’Syntax’ includes word phrases, sentences and sentence types. I classified the structures and functions of the phrases in Muqaddimat al-Adab, and simply analyzed the feature of sentence elements and word order.