<Product> <Article-Title>Ocherk Istorii Tangutskogo Gosudarstva</Article
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Review: [untitled] Author(s): Gerard Clauson Source: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1969), pp. 416-419 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of School of Oriental and African Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/614034 . Accessed: 21/03/2011 14:47 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. 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Cambridge University Press and School of Oriental and African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. http://www.jstor.org 416 REVIEWS inadequate alphabet in which a number of faithful(?)', a mistranscription of amtl: letters represented more than one sound, and 'now', and mat 'glory, honour(?)' taken in particular that the letters which represented from a damaged passage of which the true plosives, b, d, etc. also represented fricatives, reading seems to be ]kiirm a~i[.. But its v, d, etc.; we know that so far as the con- chief fault is its intolerable prolixity, which sonantal sounds are concerned there was very is reflected in the high price (?4 3s. 4d.). Dr. little difference between the phonetic structure Tekin is obviously a skilled punched card of early Turkish and the neighbouring Iranian sorter, but surely it was unnecessary to quote languages, and we know that there is great 119, 36, 8, 21, 41, and 8 words respectively confusion and inconsistency in the repre- to prove that t can occur initially, inter- sentation of the dental and palatal sibilants, vocalically, before medial consonants, after s and 8, in the inscriptions. All this labori- medial consonants, finally after vowels, and ously accumulated knowledge has gone clean finally after certain consonants ? Imagination over Dr. Tekin's head. In his preface he boggles at the number of illustrations which states that 'the basic assumptions which would have emerged if the raw material had guided my re-evaluation of the old Turkic been more than 20 pp. of text. script were (1) any given sign with the excep- Finally, a word about the title. In English tion of the vocalic and syllabic signs, repre- the language talked by Turks is, and always sents only one and the same sound whenever has been, called 'Turkish', qualified, if it occurs ...'. By p. 23 this has become '20 necessary, by an adjective (early, eastern, are double " consonant characters" (syllabic Ottoman, Republican, etc.), just as we call characters) which designate syllables begin- our own language 'English', and the lan- ning with a or i and ending in this character- guages spoken by Danes, Flemings, Poles, istic consonant. They can also represent the Spaniards, and Swedes 'Danish, Flemish, consonants alone', and on p. 30 'The old Polish, Spanish, and Swedish' respectively. Turkic system of writing is a mixture of Scholars who accept such neologisms as syllabic and alphabetic systems of writing .... 'Turkic' will have only themselves to blame Judging from this we can say that the old if they are confronted with a monograph on Turkic script was on the verge of becoming the differences between English, American, an alphabetic system of writing'. and United Nations 'Englic'. All this is of course nonsense; nearly all GERARD CLAUSON languages are rich in consonantal and vocalic sounds, and until the first true phonetic alphabets were invented in the nineteenth century, all alphabets were inadequate to YE. I. KYCHANOV: Ocherk istorii even some letters represent them, though tangutskogo gosudarstva. (Akademiya were used, singly or in combinations, to Nauk SSSR. Institut Narodov Azii.) more than one sound. The inventor represent 355 pp. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo of the runic alphabet was fortunate in the fact 'Nauka 1968. that in the script with which he was most ', Rbls. 1.65. familiar, probably Sogdian, several consonants M. V. SOFRONOV: Grammatika tangut- represented both plosives and fricatives, but skogo yazyka. (Akademiya Nauk unfortunate in the fact that nearly all short SSSR. Institut Narodov Azii.) 2 vowels were left to be supplied by the reader. vols.: 275 pp.; 404 pp. Moscow: He saw that this would not do for Turkish, Izdatel'stvo 'Nauka', 1968. Rbls. and used vowel letters in the first syllable to 3.13. represent both short and long vowels other than a/e, one for 6, 1, i, one for 0, U, and one It is odd that a people speaking a Sino- for 6, iti; but he saw no reason to do this Tibetan language, who called themselves, and later in the word. If he had to write, say, were called by the Tibetans, Mi-ilag, and in oliiriip (or more probably 616r6p),sibJiiq or the tenth century founded a kingdom called bermiq, he was quite happy to write o 1 r p, by the Chinese Hsi Hsia 'Western Hsia', s ii i 5, or b r m S and leave the reader for no better reason than that it occupied to supply the other vowels. territory which had supposedly been the The actual grammar is less open to objec- homeland of the first, probably mythical, tion. It does of course contain some mistakes ; Chinese dynasty, Hsia, some 3,000 years for example, by disregarding the fact that no earlier, should have become known to Euro- Turkish words begin with m- except loan- pean scholars first as Hsi Hsia and more words and words in which b- has become m- recently as Tangut. This name first appears by regressive assimilation to adjacent nasals as Taiut in a Tiirkti inscription erected in the (e.g. men from ben 'I '), it has added two second quarter of the eighth century, when the ghost words to the vocabulary, mati 'loyal, Tangut were still a loose confederation of REVIEWS 417 primitive tribes. The most plausible explana- the way of life of the Tangut people, with tion of it is that put forward by Aoki Bunko copious references to the original authorities, (see Kychanov, 21) that it was a geographical, from their first shadowy appearance at about not an ethnical, name and represented the the beginning of the Christian era to their Tibetan phrase thai rgod 'wild steppe'. The final disappearance (unless some of them still Tiirkii xagans were at this time in diplomatic survive as the Minyak tribe in the border relations with the kings of Tibet, who used country between Tibet and China) in the late to send delegations headed by ministers (blon) Middle Ages. The last specimen of the script to their royal funerals, and they may well is a side-note to a Chinese version of the have adopted a Tibetan name for an area Tripitaka printed between A.D. 1573 and inhabited by people akin to the Tibetans 1620 (Kychanov, 329). It is likely to remain which lay squarely between their two do- the standard book on the subject for a long minions and was not permanently controlled time to come. I am not competent to check by either. The theory, also mentioned by it with the original authorities, but it reads Kychanov, that the name was tang, the first entirely convincingly. I have found only one half of the unexplained Chinese name for the error, and that a minor second-hand one. In Tangut tang-hsiang, with the Mongolian a discussion of the existence of slavery in the plural suffix -ut, should be flatly rejected. It Tangut kingdom (p. 106) he quotes a sentence derives from Pelliot's unhappy conjecture, from the inscription of Bilge: Xa~an (east since accepted as gospel by too many scholars, side, 1. 24) as 'I routed the Tangut people that t'u-kileh, the Chinese representation of and captured their children, slaves (yutuzi:n), Tilrk~i should be transcribed tUrket and livestock and property'. But yutuz means analysed as Tiurk with the Mongolian plural 'wives' not 'slaves'; apart from its occur- suffix -it; there are several reasons why this rence, alternating with the synonymous word cannot possibly be so. There are extensive kisi:, in the same phrase elsewhere in Tiirkii references to the Tang-hsiang and the Hsi inscriptions, it occurs by itself elsewhere in Hsia kingdom in the Chinese histories, and contexts which leave no doubt that it meant specimens of the peculiar Tangut script came a (legitimate) wife. to the attention of European scholars in the Meanwhile Sofronov in Moscow has been nineteenth century, but no real progress devoting himself to a profound study of the could be made with its decipherment until language, an unusually difficult subject. the fortunate discovery by Col. Kozlov in Tangut is written, like Chinese, not in an 1909 of an extensive but damaged monastic alphabetic script but in nearly 6,000 characters library in a ruin at Kara Khoto in Inner (logograms).