MONGOLIAN MONUMENTS IN UIGHUR-MONGOLIAN SCRIPT(XIII-XVI CENTURIES)

The earlier literary monuments, written in the Mongolian language, serve the most valuable materials in researching the age-old history and culture of the Mongols. The first and most complete collection of the literary monuments, written in Mongolian, were published by academician L. Ligeti in the beginning of the 1970’s and by now it has become a library rarity. Moreover, for the last over thirty years it has been discovered newly a number of inscriptions, xylographs and manuscripts. For these reasons we are publishing a new collection of the same type, which includes all the available monuments covering the XIII-XVI centuries. This kind of a publication has a great demand for Mongolists, especially for researchers of the young generation.While preparing the present volume, almost all the relevant scientific publications for the last over hundred years were reviewed in details. This volume includes a newly revised transcription of all the pre-classical monuments available, featuring both the careful check-ups of all the previous propositions and the compiler’s suggestions based on the historical changes of the Mongolian sounds. The suggestions mostly concern such phonetic interrelationships in Mongolian like a formation of the long vowels and diphthongs, as well as a process of the vowel assimilation, differing the present version of the transcription slightly from the others in the past. The present publication includes also a full word-index of the pre-classical Mongolian monuments and a complete bibliography on their researches. Our hope is that the present research contributes as much as it can, to the study of the rich heritage of the Mongolian history and the traditional culture of the Mongols, first of all, their language and literature.