Toward a decipherment and linguistic reconstruction of the 1101 A.D. Kitan Eulogy for Empress Xuanyi, with notes on Mongolic cognates: Lines 1–6

This paper is the first in what aims to be a series of papers toward a new decipherment and linguistic reconstruction of the Kitan Assembled Script Eulogy for Empress Xuanyi of 1101 A.D. In my treatment of this inscription, I have attempted to juxtapose the Kitan text and its very roughly corresponding Chinese text as much as possible, to allow for greater accuracy in decipherment and reconstruction. This methodology has allowed me to identify several words with previously unnoticed Mongolic cognates

Formal Syntax and Deep History

We show that, contrary to long-standing assumptions, syntactic traits, modeled here within the generative biolinguistic framework, provide insights into deep-time language history. To support this claim, we have encoded the diversity of nominal structures using 94 universally definable binary parameters, set in 69 languages spanning across up to 13 traditionally irreducible Eurasian families. We found a phylogenetic signal that distinguishes all such families and matches the family-internal tree topologies that are safely established through classical etymological methods and datasets. We have retrieved “near-perfect” phylogenies, which are essentially immune to homoplastic disruption and only moderately influenced by horizontal convergence, two factors that instead severely affect more externalized linguistic features, like sound inventories. This result allows us to draw some preliminary inferences about plausible/implausible cross-family classifications; it also provides a new source of evidence for testing the representation of diversity in syntactic theories

Early Serbi-Mongolic‑Tungusic lexical contact: Jurchen numerals from the 室韋 Shirwi (Shih-wei) in North China

This paper proposes that the attested Jurchen numerals for 11-19 are probably reflexes of Archaic Jurchen numerals borrowed from the Serbi (Xianbei)-Mongolic language of the Shirwi (Shih-wei)

Khentii-Dornod Khamnigan Ewenki: Toward a revised analysis of Rinchen’s notes on a Tungusic language of Mongolia

This paper discusses my efforts in analyzing the important linguistic data on Khentii-Dornod Khamnigan Ewenki, a probably now extinct Tungusic language of Mongolia documented by the Mongolian scholar Academician B. Rinchen in the 1960s and published in his book, Mongol Ard Ulsîn Xamnigan Ayalguu [The Tungusic Dialects of the Mongolian People’s Republic]. Rinchen’s book is essentially the only source of linguistic data on Khamnigan Ewenki as once spoken in the provinces of Khentii and Dornod in northeastern Mongolia; however, the data in Rinchen’s book is largely unanalyzed and much progress has been made in the field of language description since the publication of Rinchen’s book. In this paper, I present some findings of my work toward a revised analysis of Rinchen’s notes, including an interpretation of the phonological inventory, morphological analyses, notes on the lexicon, and my efforts toward a sketch grammar of Khentii-Dornod Khamnigan Ewenki based on Rinchen’s data. My reanalyses of Rinchen’s data currently consist of an interpretation of the phonological values intended by Rinchen’s practical Cyrillic transcriptions of Khamnigan Ewenki data, reanalyses of morphemes and lexical items transcribed by Rinchen but not fully analyzed, a revised analysis of several short Khamnigan Ewenki texts documented by Rinchen, sentential data, and notes on the lexicon

The Phonology and Lexicon of Early Modern Mongolian and Late Southern Middle Mongol as Documented in a 17th century Ming Chinese-Mongolian Dictionary

In this article I present a preliminary analysis of Beilu Kao, a 17th century Ming dictionary of Mongolian, and demonstrate its value in elucidating information on the phonology and lexicon of Early Modern Mongolian and Late Southern Middle Mongol. Previous scholarship has largely treated the Beilu Kao and other variants of Beilu yiyu as a unitary source representing a single language. In fact, the Beilu Kao is a mixed lexicographical source, including wordforms copied from early Middle Mongol lexicographical works, as well as late Southern Middle Mongol dialectal forms, and most importantly, transcriptions of Early Modern Mongolian, as I will demonstrate in this paper

Early Serbi-Mongolic-Tungusic lexical contact: Jurchen numerals from the Shirwi (Shih-wei) in North China

Many scholars have written about the Jurchen-Manchu numerals 11-19, beginning with Wilhelm Schott (1853). Berthold Laufer (1921) first recognized the Mongolic affinity of these numerals, and his basic proposal has been largely upheld since. Despite the long history of work on this subject, the precise details of the relationship between these numerals and Mongolic, the specific language or dialect from which the numerals were borrowed, and the historical context of this loan relationship have remained unexplained. I propose in this paper that the attested Jurchen numerals for 11-19 are probably reflexes of Archaic Jurchen numerals borrowed from the Serbi-Mongolic language of the Shirwi (Shih-wei)