The “Translation” Chapter of the Late Ming Lulongsai Lüe. Bilingual Sections of a Chinese Military Collection 9789004302808

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The “Translation” (譯部) Chapter of the Late Ming Lulongsai lüe (盧龍塞略)

The Languages of Asia Series Series Editor Alexander Vovin (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) Editorial Board Wolfgang Behr ( University of Zurich) Uwe Bläsing (University of Leiden) Stefan Georg (University of Bonn) Toshiki Osada (Institute of Humanity and Nature (Kyoto)) Bjarke Frellesvig (University of Oxford) Juwon Kim (Seoul National University) Ross King (University of British Columbia) Dongho Ko ( Jeonbuk National University) Mehmet Ölmez (Istanbul Technology University) Laurent Sagart (CRLAO, Paris) Claus Schönig (Freie Universität Berlin) Marek Stachowski (University of Krakow) Yukinori Takubo (Kyoto University) John Whitman (Cornell University)

VOLUME 14

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The “Translation” (譯部) Chapter of the Late Ming Lulongsai lüe (盧龍塞略) Bilingual Sections of a Chinese Military Collection By

Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2452-2961 isbn 978-90-04-30280-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30281-5 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Preface ix Sources xi Structure and Contents xvi Results and Consequences xx Acknowledgements xxii Technical Notes xxiii Abbreviations xxv 1 Transcription and Reconstruction 1 2 Word Index 72 3 Character Variants in the Text 169 Bibliography 171 Facsimile 175

Preface The bilingual Sino-Mongol works represent a well-documented, researched and analyzed area of diachronic linguistics. The wide variety of the documents concerned encompassed a scale ranging from the grandiose work of the Secret History of Mongols1 to the teaching materials of the translation bureaus bearing less literary but equally important linguistic values. From the early decades of the 20th century many of these works were published by eminent scholars providing more and more accurate reconstructions of the embodied Middle Mongol linguistic data. The work of the Yuan, Ming and Qing translation and interpretation bureaus (Si Yi Guan 四夷館 and Hui Tong Guan 會同館) has been studied and evaluated extensively, too.2 Since most of these works have undergone thorough philological and linguistic analysis and are now well known to the academic public, I do not feel it necessary to give a detailed introduction to them here.3 There are, however, still some almost untouched, yet important and sometimes voluminous sources left for the linguists of the 21st century to investigate. One of the less researched works is the Sino-Mongol glossary Yibu 譯部 (ʻTranslation part’)4 incorporated in the 17th century military work the Lulongsai lüe (盧龍塞略 ‘Outline of the Lulong pass’ henceforth abbreviated as LLSL), a late Ming treatise on military issues concerning the territories now belonging to the Eastern part of Hebei province in China bordering the western part of Liaoning. The compiler of the LLSL was Guo Zaoqing 郭造卿 a Fujianese writer and poet, author of books like Yanshi 燕史 (The History of Yan), Yongping zhi 永平志 (The record of Yongping) etc. His edition being a 1  Hundreds of articles and dozens of reconstructions and translations of the Secret History are widely available; a splendid translation and generally used comprehensive edition is by Igor de Rachewiltz (2006). 2  Wild, Norman: Materials for the Study of the Ssǔ I Kuan 四夷(譯)館 (Bureau of translators). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1945), pp. 617–640. 3  For more exhaustive descriptions of the sources and the methods for their reconstruction cf., Lewicki 1949 and 1959 (Hua Yi yiyu and reconstruction methods); Ligeti 1950 (comprehensive and reconstruction methods); Haenisch 1952 (comprehensive); Franke 1968 (comprehensive), Mostaert-de Rachewiltz 1977 (Hua Yi yiyu); Kara 1990 (Zhiyuan yiyu), Kuribayashi 2003 (Hua Yi yiyu), Apatóczky 2009b (Beilu yiyu and reconstruction methods), Rykin 2012 (Wu bei zhi/2 and reconstruction methods). 4  It actually consists of two separate glossaries marked 譯上 and 譯下. For a preliminary report on the peculiarities of its reconstruction cf. Apatóczky 2015.

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military work the official publisher was Wang Xianggan 王象乾 the minister of the Ministry of War in the Ming court. The LLSL was finally published in the Gengxu 庚戌 year of the Wanli 萬曆 period (1610) almost two decades after the Guo Zaoqing’s death in 1593. The LLSL is made up of 20 chapters (卷), ­containing various compilations from biographies of outstanding military personnel to descriptions of the defense system, military organization, logistics and geography of the area with a large number of maps and illustrations as well as an extra chapter for the appendix. The part, nevertheless, which has mostly been in the forefront of this relatively poorly appreciated work is the Chinese-Mongolian bilingual glossary included in the 19th chapter. The original copy of the LLSL is preserved in the National Central Library in Taipei, a photocopy of which was the primary source I used during my work.5 As the LLSL contains one of the last Ming Sino-Mongol vocabularies without a proper critical reconstruction until now, this document is of key importance. The glossary has not yet been thoroughly investigated nor was its linguistic data systematically processed. A photocopy of the complete LLSL including the glossary itself was republished unceremoniously once on Taiwan6 without much explanation. Some efforts were made by mainland Chinese scholars to give a general view about the Mongolian material in it but these attempts did not stand the test of time (Jia-Zhu 1990 pp. 169–192;7 Manduqu 1995 379–5988). A transcription of the LLSL text was also published by Ishida in Japan (1938 and revised in 1973). When processing the linguistic material of these glossaries one has to take into consideration the restrictions set by the sometimes confined competence of the authors. As in every human pursuit, outstanding members of the actual activity were usually representing the exception rather than the rule.

5  Guo Zaoqing [ed.]: Lulongsai lüe 郭造卿: 盧龍塞略. 明萬曆庚戌(三十八)年, 新城. [Gengxu year (1610) of the Wanli period of Ming, Xincheng]. National Central Library, Taipei, Rare Books Collection, call № 210.3 03790. 6  Wu Xiangxiang 吳相湘 (et al. eds.): 中國史學叢書. 三編 (27) (明)郭造卿: 盧龍塞略(1–2). [Chinese History Collection, 3rd series (27), (Ming) Guo Zaoqing: Lulongsai lüe (1–2)]. Taiwan Students’ Bookstore, Taipei, 1987. 7  Here we can find transcriptions of the LLSL and other bilingual texts published in simplified (!) Chinese character set as well as a lot of very questionable and doubtful reconstructed forms. 8  Manduqu’s book despite its contribution of giving modern Mongol translations of the entries in Mongol script as well as proposing reconstructed forms, unfortunately contains quite a few errors both in transcription and translation. The quality of the reconstructions is very uneven, a large number of them are not convincing. For a more detailed description see Apatóczky 2015.

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The difficulty of attracting personnel was caused by the comparatively low status of the Ssǔ I Kuan, and by its general inefficiency and neglect. Capable men sought to be promoted out of the Ssǔ I Kuan as soon as possible. The low caliber of students is indicated by the repeated complaints in official documents of inefficiency, insubordination and general indifference. Many people bribed their way into the Ssǔ I Kuan, apparently because of the opportunities for intrigues with foreigners. But the fact that members of the Ssǔ I Kuan accompanied officials on foreign missions as advisors, and were sent to border stations (. . .) seems to show that some of the translators could do responsible work.9 Dispraising as these words may sound, they may give us some insight into why the niveau of the bilingual texts is so uneven. Another reason is that these glossaries were not meant to feature academic values, but were instead, compiled to provide a very basic vocabulary—probably to go along with an extensive use of gesture language—indispensable for interacting with the speakers on the other side of the language barrier.10 Let us also not forget that the original works already bearing some signs of the negligence of their authors are not the ones that we may access and the sources actually available to us were in most cases copied multiple times, each increasing chances for textual corruption. Furthermore, the bilingual works circulated by these bureaus often served as bases when newer compilations were compiled and in many cases, the authors did not bother citing their sources. All these reasons are enough to make us unsurprised when we encounter unusual or unexpected forms or syntactic constructions. While working with these bilingual sources, one must bear in mind that the compilers may not have had proper knowledge of the language(s) they were working with. Therefore, sometimes we may come across not only unusual forms but also odd syntagmatic structures that are against Mongolian syntax just because the compiler or copyist simply put one word after another without paying attention to their being in accord with linguistic agreement etc. Sources As most of the Yuan and Ming Sino-Mongol linguistic data are embedded in bilingual glossaries, when I took the voluminous lexicon (compared to other similar works) of the LLSL as a topic of my recent research the original goal of 9  Wild 1945 pp. 618–619. 10  Kane, Daniel 1989. The Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters. Uralic and Altaic Series. Vol. 153. Bloomington, Indiana University Publications, p. 100.

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the plan was to present a detailed and precise classification of its Middle Mongol vocabulary, and thus as a part of a larger scale research to demonstrate that the once assumed hypothetical Middle Mongol language was in fact a dialect-geographical frame of many independent dialects rather than a more or less uniform linguistic state in Mongolian diachronic data.11 The key element in this work was the reconstruction of the Middle Mongol vocabulary represented in LLSL. Until recently the public opinion about the categorization of the LLSL as an independent intellectual achievement was unanimous, even though it was known that it borrowed large portions from other Sino-Mongol sources. As it was customary in the Chinese literary tradition the compilers and scribes of LLSL did not cite the sources they used quite extensively. Even after a superficial reading of the text it seems clear that there are complete sections copied from previous works. The most famous of them is the Hua Yi yiyu 華夷譯語 (Hy), from which a great amount of the LLSL’s lexicon was borrowed. The version of Hy the compilers used was the one quoted by Kuribayashi as “乙”,12 that is a later or “B” version of Hy from 1407. Proofs for the source are the following entries where the copied forms contain characters only attested in this later version of Hy: 1.13a18 tuīcí yuē shēn-dá-ā-lán 推 曰申答阿藍 Ch. ‘to decline (an invitation)’ (read tǎ 塔 instead of dá 答, is a character variant for 辭) šiltālam ‘to excuse oneself, to have an excuse’ (cf. Hy 611. «推辞 申塔藍» Kuribayashi 2003/乙: «申塔阿藍») 口

口

1.14b25 cāng máng yuē yá-ā-lán 倉忙曰 阿藍 Ch. ‘(to be in a) hurry’ ( is a character variant for 牙) ya’aram (cf. Hy 546. «忙 舌藍» Kuribayashi 2003/乙: 阿藍») 2.4a21 mí yuē ā-lá-hēi-tái 糜曰阿剌黑台 Ch. ‘roebuck’ (read zhāng 麞 instead of mí 糜) araqtai (cf. Hy 143. «獐 阿舌剌台» Kuribayashi 2003/乙: 阿剌黑台