만주어와 몽골어 어휘의 유사성에 대하여 - 《御製滿珠蒙古漢字三合切音淸文鑑》수록 어휘를 중심으로 -

Abstract

How similar are Manchu and Mongolian words? This simple question made the writer search resemblances between them from the available data. Seeing that these languages began to be studied genealogically after the birth of modern comparative linguistics, the writer, struggling some years for rearranging Manchu‐Mongol vocabulary in the Qingwenjian’s, was easily led to the question in this paper of how they recognized the differences between their languages in the 18th century. Having assumed that “Yuzhi-manzhu-menggu-hanzi-sanhe-qieyin-qingwenjian (御製滿珠蒙古漢字三合切音淸文鑑)” should reflect their intuition soundly, he tried to compare the words in the basic vocabulary list of 100, which is well ‐known in this academic world. Ignorance of some differences in the researchers’ opinion has led him to follow Rozycki’s (1984, 1994) in the interpretation. As the result, only six out of 100 basic words were confirmed to show sound correspondences owing to their genetic relationship. Many of the Manchu‐Mongol words resemble each other seemingly, but decent number of them were sure to turn out to be loan‐words in comparativists’ point of view. Direction of borrowing is mostly from Mongolian to Manchu. Considering that the two nations have been in close contact with each other for quite a long time, we’d better assume that the borrowing has taken place cumulatively over several times. However, it’s worth to point out as a problem that we can find but a few doublets so that borrowed words are not of enough number to be regarded to have completely replaced the proper ones. To take a familiar example, more than half of the Korean words are borrowed from Chinese but corresponding native ones are still in use.(Eg. daek(<Ch. 宅‘zhái’) is a loan word from Chinese but jip “home” is still used in Korean.) English, borrowing a lot of Latin or French words, is no exception. In this respect, problem of genealogical relationship and borrowing between Manchu and Mongolian needs to be studied in more depth. The vocabulary is dealt with in this paper, but grammatical structure and morphology are also essential for the comparative study in view of the linguistic genealogy. These studies are left for the future to be challenged.