National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

these questions orally; this would certainly have enabled us to clear up many dubious points. As it is, our discussions have had to be carried on by correspondence. In the field, of course, as we were none of us linguists, we used the simplest possible Swedish transcription, writing down the names as they sounded in our ears. Here, many of these names appear in a more standardized form; and some of them wear a very different aspect from that they bore in e. g. the previous popular publications. In some cases I have drawn attention to the fact in a note. In the Index I have given several forms of some names.

In two cases I have definitely departed from Dr GRf NBECH's system. In some names I have preferred ö to u, and I have written nor for »lake » and not nur. The latter departure I defend by adducing the fact that nor has become such a standing form for those of us who deal with Mongolian geography that it is now scarcely possible to change. Another inconsistency is that some names have been given in conformity with the written language and others with the considerably simpler spoken language. The Mongol names in this work thus provide rather a motley from the point of view of the linguist, although consistency has been striven for. I think, however, that travellers should find it possible to identify all the names, both Mongol and Turki — if they are pronounced tolerably correctly.

The consonants are pronounced as in English and the vowels as in Italian, except in Mongol words, where u covers two different sounds: the first resembling German u, or the English u in put (but somewhat palatalized as in Norwegian), and the second being a very guttural vowel, near the vowel-sound of the English bought. Other letters that may give rise to difficulties are explained below:

ai in some Mongol words in the modern dialect is like è in French mère or a in English bad,

gh guttural, g now closed, now open, is like y in modern Greek,

j in Chinese and Russian is equivalent to the French j, otherwise as in English, kh hard guttural as in German ach,

ö is very close to the English vowel-sound in fur,

q in Turki, a guttural k.

In Mongolian names the stress is on the first syllable.

The use of hyphens is unhappy from the linguistic point of view, but it simplifies matters for the general reader.

In many places Dr HEDIN has himself provided the translation of names, and it would not have been difficult to give renderings for the great majority; but this must wait until the linguists are ready to tackle all the names from the etymological point of view in, as I hope, a special monograph.

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