Language Contacts and Language Changes in the Mongolian Society of the 13^<th> and the 14^<th> centuries

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This research aimed to investigate the language contacts and the linguistic changes in the Mongolian society of the 13^<th> and the 14^<th> centuries, namely the Yuan Period, in view of the Middle Mongolian language corpus, especially Buddhist works not only form the philological but also from the sociolinguistic viewpoints. How this research should be done concretely was shown in the paper read at the 42^<nd> Permanent International Altaistic Conference held in August 1999 at Prague. This paper clarifies how the original translation made in the 14^<th> century, gone through several modifications, was transmitted from generation to generation. With this result as well as experiences of reading Buddhist works at hand, I began to do research on the language contacts and linguistic changes that the Middle Mongolian had suffered. The result was the paper read in September, 2000 at Kyoto. The Mongols at that time, faced with Uyighur, Sanskrit and Tibetan, all of which were the lauguages with high dignity, had managed to translate Buddhist canon into Mongolian. In doing that, the Mongolian translators made many misunderstandings and mistranslations, which were the testimony of the efforts for the Mongols to introduce the forerunning cultures. The third paper discussing how the Mongolian Buddhist canon was translated and transmitted was read at an academic meeting at Kyoto with the presence of Dr. Sazykin of the St. Petersburg Branch of Russian Oriental Academy, where I visited and investigated the collection of Mongolian manuscripts and printings the last summer. He showed much interest in this and promised to do jointed research on several Mongolian Buddhist works. This also can be said a good by-product of this project.