Re: Mongolian Transcription (Bataar vs. Baatar)

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>   These are indeed taxonomically correct. An extensive search applied that
> use of baatar is wrong in the sense that it was not the original usage of
> the stem given.

Which IMHO shouldn't matter. :-)

>   As it turned out, there are other variant spellings depending on how
> they sound, including batar.

How they sound? Or how they sound to whoever wrote it?

> <Is it stress? And/or length? To me it looks like an analogy to e. g.
> Finnish where double vowels indicate length... then there are monosyllabic
> words like khaan* where stress is inapplicable.>
>
>   Having heard a little Mongolian spoken, it sounds like stress.

Thank you. -- In many languages stress and length are coupled, though. This 
is why it is so amazing to hear a Czech pronounce the name of the componist 
Janácek (upside-down ^ on the c) where the first syllable is stressed but the 
second is extremely long. :-)

> Hard versus soft pronounciation, or stressing,
> makes me wonder where Maleyev got the idea,

Which idea?

> <Definitely not. Ö [try to make a beautiful vowel of "er"] and u [as in
> "butcher", "bush"...] are different sounds, and different letters in
> Cyrillic! Double ö and ü exist, too.>
>
>   Just as in English where oh, uh, oo, and stressed oo (in "book") [where
> the last two are interchangeable in some dialects, as in creek versus
> "crick", so forth; "book" or "look" never seem to sound like "roof",
> though]. Different sounds, different or similar letters.

The Cyrillic letters are not similar. Have a look at www.magicnet.mn (the 
only Mongolian website I happen to know...). In the ad at the top, in the 
part that doesn't move, you'll find two ö in the second word (and three ü in 
the last black word).

> Finnish and
> convention in Finnish or other Scandinavian/Germanic tongues

Ts, ts. Finnish isn't even Indo-European. It's Uralic, like Hungarian and 
Samoyed. :-)

> does not
> derive from a source similar to Mongolian, and this should be a warning.

Right. But the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet was obviously derived from the 
Russian one, and Finnish was spoken next to, Estonian and Karelian inside the 
Soviet Union...

> In Cyrillic there may be different letters, but once again, without an
> established Mongolian only (not what it sounds like in Russian) alphabet,

Again: There is one. No, three.

> this is impractical to enforce one languages rules on another system.

Which is, to some extent which is unknown to me, definitely what the inventor 
of the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet did.

> For instance, Russian characterizes "shuvuu"
> as written in Cyrillic as "bird",

Why "Russian characterizes"?

>  That the name and spelling of
> *Achillobator* derived from a Mongolian publication suggests that there
> (still) is no convention on standardized spelling of the word "hero".

To me it suggests that the author tried to make it look more international by 
using Russian conventions. Which is what Russians did on all the occasions 
I've seen Mongolian names in a Russian text. You won't find Ulaanbaatar in a 
Russian text, only Ulan Bator -- and you'll find only the former and never 
the latter in the few Mongolian texts I've seen. Sort of like using Vienna 
for a city that calls itself Wien. -- In the only Proceedings of the Joint 
Soviet-Mongolian Paleontological Expedition volume I have, all the articles 
are in Russian, and there it says Udan Sayr. The Mongolian table of contents 
(or was it an abstract...) says Üüden sayr.

> A
> similar problem I found was the difference between "ula" and "uul"
> (mountain) in place names, and this is just as strange;

Maybe a difference between dialects... but then, in the same volume, it says 
Shara TSav in Russian and Shar tsav in Mongolian. ~:-|