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0263 Notes on Marco Polo : vol.2
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.2 / Page 263 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000246
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365. TOSCAOR   859

cannot well be maintained that the many occurrences of tiimän as « ten thousand » in the Uigu rtexts from the Turfan region are all of the Mongol period or later. Tümän türlüg can very well be interpreted literally as « in 10,000 different manners », although meaning in fact « of many sorts ». And that Kâsyari should wrongly give «1,000,000» for tümän ming is not of much value, since, even with that wrong result, Kàsyari takes tümän as a definite number, and tümän cannot be synonymous with ming, which his wrong equivalence would imply.

Pian Carpini says that, for « 10,000 », the Mongols use a word meaning « tenebre » ( Wy, 77). There is a confusion, but I do not think it is due to Plan Carpini's mistaking tümän, « 10,000 », for Turk. tuman, « fog » (duman is Osmanli; tuman has passed into Russian; it does not exist in Mongolian). As has already been mentioned by others, and as VAN DEN WYNGAERT says himself, t' ma in Russian means both « 10,000 » and « obscurity », and there are several slavicisms in Plan Carpini, due to his interpreters.

[PELLIOT had added a note :   t'ê-wu (t`ak-mku) is used for Wan-hu (see « Vanchu ») in
San ch'ao pei mêng hui pien quoted by WANG Kuo-wei, Mêng-ta pei-lu, 10 a. Di; t'u-wan (t`uô-mjwEn) was a surname in the Wei dynasty (cf. K'ang-hsi tzä-tien, s. v. n fl. A.C.M.]

365. TOSCAOR ( < *TOSCAOL)

aschaol V chostaar VA roschaor LT

rostanorum P toscaer TA'

toscanor (?) F

toscaol R

toscaor F(?), FA, FB

« Toscaol » is RAMUSIO's form, supported by V, and I think it is better than the « toscaor » of F adopted in B1, 144; all such turko-mongol titles end in -1, not in -r.

According to Polo, « toscaol » means « people on watch-duty ». YULE (Y, I, 407) has justly quoted Turk. J) ..y tosqaul of PAVET DE COURTEILLE (p. 233) and ZENKER (p. 3213), « watch man », « road-watchman », but is wrong in bringing in also Mo. « tosiyal »; this last word, correctly tusiyal, means « office » in general, and belongs to a group which has in « classical » Mongol a double form tüsi- and tus'i-, but, in the Mongol period, the only form I know is tüsi-, hence tü§imäl, « official ».

Tosqaul itself is a curious form. RADLOV has listed separately, in Jay., tosqaul and tosqaul (iii, 1210, 1521), but there can be no doubt that it is one and the same word, of which toqsaul (III, 1155), tuqsaul (III, 1428), toqtaul (III, 1153), tutqaul (III, 1487) are only various forms, with arbitrary vocalizations in -u- or -o-. In my opinion, we must start from tutyaq, already given in Kàsyari with the meaning « night-watch » (BROCKELMANN, 220) ; the root is probably tut-, « to hold ». From tutyaq, tutya'ul (dialectally tutqa'ul) is derived regularly. We have some cases of alternation between t and s at the end of a syllable in Mongolian.

The secondary form tusqa'ul (< tutya'ul) originated very likely in Mongolian circles, and came back into Jay., sometimes with a metathesis tuqsa'ul, just as the original tutya'ul also gave