Menggu Ziyun
| Menggu Ziyun | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 蒙古字韻 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 蒙古字韵 | ||||||||
|
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Měnggǔ Zìyùn |
| Wade–Giles | Meng-ku Tzŭ-yün |
Menggu Ziyun (Chinese: 蒙古字韻, "Rimes in Mongol Script") is a 14th-century rime dictionary of Chinese as written in the 'Phags-pa script that was used during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). The only surviving examplar of this dictionary is an 18th-century manuscript copy that belonged to Stephen Wootton Bushell (1844–1908), and is now held at the British Library (Or. 6972). As the only known example of a 'Phags-pa script dictionary of Chinese, it is important both as an aid for interpreting Yuan dynasty texts and inscriptions written in Chinese using the 'Phags-pa script, and as a source for the reconstructed pronunciation of Old Mandarin.
The British Library manuscript was acquired by the antiquarian and art historian S. W. Bushell when he worked as a physician at the British Legation in Beijing, China from 1868 to 1900, probably in 1872 during a trip to Inner Mongolia and the ruins of Shangdu, the fabled summer capital of the Yuan emperors then known as "Xanadu" in English. In April 1909, a year after his death, Bushell's widow, Florence Bushell, sold the manuscript to the British Museum in London, and it is now held by the British Library (shelfmark Or. 6972).
The manuscript is written on thin, brown paper which has been mounted on white backing paper and bound in two traditional stitched volumes, each 24.7 × 17.3 cm. Each folio of the manuscript is 22.5 × 28.8 cm in size, folded in half as is normal in stitch-bound volumes. The text is written in vertical columns running from left to right across the page, which is the opposite of traditional Chinese books, but follows the layout of Mongolian script and 'Phags-pa texts. The first volume comprises an unnumbered title folio and 33 numbered folios, and the second volume comprises an unnumbered title folio and 31 numbered folios, of which page 30b and 31a are blank except for the volume and page numbers. The missing section covers the rimes in -a and -e, as well as the first part of the appended Taboo Characters section, which Junast and Yang Naisi have calculated should actually take up three full folios (i.e. the second volume of the original edition would have comprised 33 folios).
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