This fine composite volume is, as the preface (but not the title or the front cover) reveals, a Festschrift in honour of one of the most prolific and influential contributors to the field of Altaic studies of our time – György Kara (b. 23 June 1935).
The tome collects 24 scholarly papers which cover the breadth and wealth of the different fields on which Kara was and remains active, namely (and mostly) Mongolian studies, Turkology and Tungusology. Most papers address problems of early written Mongolian monuments – or even the earliest, as in the case of Wu Yingzhe, “The last-words [sic] of Xiao Chala Xianggong in Khitan script”, pp. 384–93, on “Para-Mongolic” Khitan. Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky, “The Yibu (譯部) chapter of the Lulongsai lüe (盧龍塞略)”, pp. 1–15, deals with the Mongolian entries in a seventeenth-century (1610) military text, with a detailed elucidation of its copying history and a thorough demonstration that this material does not represent a coherent dialect or chronological layer. Otgon Borjigin, “Some remarks on page fragments of a Mongol book of Taoist content from Qaraqota”, pp. 80–100, is actually a full edition of these fragments (possibly from the early fourteenth century), with facsimile, transcription, translation, commentary and glossary. Olivér Kápolnás and Alice Sárközi, “A Mongolian text of confession”, pp. 147–73, edit, with facsimiles, transcription and translation, a Buddhist text, probably from the seventeenth century.
Volker Rybatzky, in “Some medical and related terms in Middle Mongγol”, pp. 273–307, offers 147 thematically chosen entries from his much anticipated forthcoming Etymological Dictionary of Middle Mongγol, a work which will without doubt be a major contribution to Mongolian studies. Brian Baumann, “The scent of a woman: allegorical misogyny in a Sa skya pa treatise on salvation in pre-classical Mongolian verse”, pp. 28–58, is not a linguistic study, but deals with Buddhist attitudes towards women, with a tour de force through parallels, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Dante. Michael Weiers, “Zum Werktitel mongolischer Texte seit dem 17. Jahrhundert”, pp. 369–83, examines Mongolian book-titles with the well-known formulaic termination in orusiba(i), which, according to the author, is (often) to be read as an indication that the text at hand is based on other, earlier, texts which are reported on, presented again, compiled etc., thus not stipulating a translation as “has begun, begins here”, as it is usually done, but rather along the lines of “is the basis of this text, was present/available, is given here” (not as an “original work”). Natalia Yakhontova, “Proper names in the Oirat translation of The Sutra of Golden Light”, 394–429, discusses 71 (often translated and thus “talking”) proper names from the West Mongolian Altan Gerel.
Modern Mongolian variants are the subject of six papers: Ágnes Birtalan, “Some aspects of the language usage of Darkhat and Oirat female shamans”, pp. 59–79, based on the author's fieldwork in Mongolia since the 1990s. Benjamin Brosig, “Pronouns and other terms of address in Khalkha Mongolian”, pp. 101–11, is a preliminary report on a longer study on addressing others in Ulaanbaatar Khalkha. Jacques Legrand, “Contraction, anticipation et perseveration en mongol xalx: quelques réflexions”, pp. 194–213, offers original thoughts on some Khalkha verbal suffixes (e.g. -жээ/-чээ). Ines Stolpe and Alimaa Senderjav, “On the phenomeno-logic behind some Mongolian verbs”, pp. 347–56, also deal with modern Khalkha Mongolian, mostly with what the present writer would refer to as metaphorical extensions of more concrete (verbal) meanings. Jan-Olof Svantesson, “Spelling variation in Cornelius Rahmn's Kalmuck manuscripts as evidence for sound changes”, pp. 357–65, presents a number of variant renderings of identical words in this early-nineteenth-century source on oral Kalmyk, but reaches the conclusion that it remains unclear whether these can really be attributed to “ongoing sound change” at the time of recording. Finally, a Santa (prosecutive/directive nominal) suffix is the subject of Hans Nugteren's “The Dongxiang (Santa) ending -ğuŋ and its allies”, pp. 214–29, where the dean of Gansu-Mongolic studies offers a well-reasoned and amply documented (new) etymology of this marker.
Pavel Rykin, “Reflexes of *VgV and *VxV groups in the Mongol vocabulary of the Sino-Mongol glossary Dada yu/Beilu yiyu (late 16th–early 17th c.), pp. 308–32, and Bayarma Khabtagaeva, “The role of Ewenki VgV in Mongolic reconstruction”, pp. 174–93 deal, incidentally, with the same phoneme groups in Proto-Mongolian, and manage to elucidate the chronology of events from very different perspectives.
Tungusic languages and (early and recent) linguistic data are the objects of this latter paper and of: Andrew Shimunek, “Early Serbi-Mongolic-Tungusic lexical contact: Jurchen numerals from the 室 韋 Shirwi (Shih-wei) in north China”, pp. 331–46, José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente, “Past tenses, diminutives and expressive palatalization: typology and the limits of internal reconstruction in Tungusic”, pp. 112–37, and Alexander Vovin, “Four Tungusic etymologies” (pp. 366–8), the shortest contribution to this volume; this would invite several comments, for which there is insufficient space here, but I would add the non-trivial correction that this reviewer does not view “Udihe and Uilta as Northern Tungusic languages” (p. 367), but the former and Oroč.
Turkology, old, middle and new, is represented by Christopher P. Atwood, “Middle Turkic dialects as seen in Chinese transcriptions from the Mongol Yuan era”, 16–27, Daniel Prior, “Sino-Mongolica in the Qırġız epic poem Kökötöy's memorial feast by Saġımbay Orozbaq uulu”, 230–257, Klaus Röhrborn, “Kollektaneen zum Uigurischen Wörterbuch: Zwei Weisheiten und Drei Naturen im Uigurischen Buddhismus”, 266–272, and Elizabetta Ragagnin, “Badǝkšaan”, 258–265 (on a supernatural creature from the mythology of some South-Siberian Turkic-speaking (Tuvan and Dukhan) groups, with a compelling etymological explanation).
Finally, Juha Janhunen, “From Tatar to Magyar: notes on Central Eurasian ethnonyms in -r” (138–146), draws a broad picture which encompasses the three mentioned language families plus Hungarian and explains the ubiquitous element -r found in many ethnonyms and also, among other things, in the name Magyar, as going back to a Proto-Turkic plural suffix, which, ultimately, goes back to *-s.
