Some entries of the Hua Yi yiyu revisited
(58th Meeting Dunajská Streda, 2015)
This paper is a by-product of a recent academic project in which I have reconstructed the Middle Mongol vocabulary of the 17 th century comprehensive Chinese military work called Lulongsai lüe (盧龍塞略, LLSL), a document of key importance containing one of the last Sino-Mongol glossaries without proper critical reconstruction until now. The result of this project is to be published later this year. The reconstruction resulted in a near complete clarification of the earlier sources the compilers of this work used in the bilingual part. I found that in opposition to what scholars have thought of it until now the material is not homogeneous and does not represent a single linguistic status, it does, however, throw some light on the chronological and philological questions concerning the earlier works incorporated in it. One of the sources of LLSL was the famous Hua Yi yiyu (華夷譯語, Hy).
During the course of the reconstruction work I have come across several problematic reconstructed forms in the earlier publications on Hy (Lewicki, Haenisch, Cleaves, Ligeti, Mostaert etc.) that in my opinion need revision. Erroneous forms vary from simple omissions of umlauts changing the vowel harmony setup of a lexeme to the more complex ones in which cases the reconstruction of the entire word should be reconsidered.