Buryat Language

This chapter deals with the Mongolian material in Witsen's Noord en Oost
Tartarye, with the exception of two relatively long glossaries, one of Kalmyk (NOT II 1692:118-121; NOT I 1705, 297-304) and the other of"Daur" (NOT I 1705, 68-73), which are discussed in separate chapters. The material includes several phrases in Mongolian, a translation of the Lord's Prayer, Mongolian and Kalmyk alphabets, and the language data referred to as "Tan gut", as well as a number of proper nouns and place names listed in the 1705 edition of Noord en Oost Tartarye (NOT I 1705, 270-272). Mongolian words are also scattered throughout the chapters discussing the parts of 'Tartarye' that were occupied by Mongolian-related political and ethnic groups, or areas that had once been under Mongolian influence The survey of the scattered data is not exhaustive and will certainly require further study, especially taking into account other early European records about 'Tartarye'. Further study would allow us to improve our understanding of the confusing parts of the data that are the result of erroneous and distorted transcriptions and translations.
The problem of the orthographic conventions in rendering a foreign language in Latin script is central to our understanding any system behind the linguistic materials found in Noord en Oost Tartarye. The transcriptions in Noord en Oost Tartarye are far from systematic. It is of course impossible to expect complete consistency in a 17th-century compilation from different sources. Even a brief examination of the relevant sections shows that the diversity is due to the use of a variety of sources for the many languages and dialects involved, some of which were poorly understood and translated. Although we should attempt to identify Witsen' s sources as precisely as possible, the vagueness of the transcriptions makes reliable conclusions about certain linguistic features difficult. Even so, Witsen's work is a precious source of data and, as such, it has often been cited in the context of the comparative study of the Mongolic languages (Sanzheev 1977, 65; Krueger 1975). In an attempt to deal with these problems, we are proposing a source based
classification applying to the parts in Witsen's work that contain Mongolian linguistic material, though this classification may be applied to the sections dealing with other languages as well. We classifY the data according to their sources as follows: 1) material from Russian documents or informants, 2) material from accounts by other European travellers (written mostly in Latin, English, French or Dutch), and 3) direct oral information given by Mongolian individuals and communities to Witsen himself and interpreted by him or his immediate collaborators.

В настоящей статье предлагается на основе анализа произведений современных бурятских авторов и глубинных интервью с писателями, издателями и лингвистами проследить за взаимовлиянием и взаимопроникновением сетевой и «бумажной» литературы, а также определить координаты Бурят-Монголии в глобальных языковых и исторических пространствах и их онлайн и офлайн эманациях. Читая нарративные произведения Геннадия Башкуева, Алексея Гатапова, Анны Банаевой (опубликованные в Facebook), tri_tabuna (опубликованные на «Сайте бурятского народа»)  и Булата Молонова (опубликованные в сети, а затем вошедшие в книгу «Танец орла»), авторы статьи обращали внимание на формы взаимодействия авторов с прошлым (личное или дистанцированное), на основные периоды, к которым они обращались, а также на выбор ими языка для наррации.