Yugurology

 

Yugurology, or the study of the Yugur languages, has a history of about a hundred years.

Grigorij Nikolajevich Potanin   The first to report on the languages of both the Western and Eastern Yugur was the Russian explorer Grigorij Nikolajevich Potanin (1835-1920). During his expedition in northern China in 1884-1886, he recorded a small glossary of Western and Eastern Yugur words, along with notes on the administrative and geographical situation. His materials were published in 1893.

Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim   Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim (1867-1951), the later president of Finland, visited the Yugur in 1907, during his 1906-1908 reconnoitring expedition through Central Asia and northern China. He collected more extensive information on the customs and material culture of the Yugur people. For his anthropological research he also took some craniometrical measurements, besides pictures of landscapes, people, clothing and objects of daily usage. He furthermore recorded a small glossary of Western and Eastern Yugur words. His materials were published in 1911.

Visit a small exhibition on Mannerheim's travels (external link at the Wayback Machine).

Sergej Efimovich Malov   The first turcologist to visit the Yugur was the Russian Sergej Efimovich Malov (1880-1957); during his linguistic expeditions in northern China in 1909-1911 and 1913-1915, he visited the Yugur at several occasions, altogether for about 15 months. During his research he made recordings on wax rolls by means of a phonograph.
      Malov collected mainly materials on Western Yugur. A small part of his findings was published in several articles in the 1910s, but it was only in 1957 that his first monograph was published, comprising a vocabulary of more than 5500 words, followed by the second volume in 1967 dealing with his rich collection of texts of diverse content. Both monographs were published with the assistance of Malov's student Tenishev.

The eventual publication of his materials was impelled by a sense of scholarly competition, since by this time, Chinese scholars had started to research the Western Yugur language.

Matthias Hermanns   Matthias Hermanns (1899-1972), who as a missionary of the Roman Catholic congregation Societas Verbi Divini (founded in 1875 in Steyl in the Netherlands) was mainly active among the Tibetans of the Amdo region in the 1930s, provided some information on the culture and religion of the Western Yugur, including a small number of texts. He was also the first to collect an extensive comparative vocabulary of both Western and Eastern Yugur. Hermanns' language materials, however, are presented in a rather distorted orthography. There are some indications that these Western and Eastern vocabulary lists might have been recorded with one and the same person, who was bilingual in Western and Eastern Yugur.

Èdgem Raximovich Tenishev   In the late 1950s several Sino-Russian research expeditions were organised in Gansù and Qinghai Provinces. The main participants researching the Western Yugur language were the Chinese turcologists Chén Zongzhèn and his wife Léi Xuanchun of the Institute of Nationality Languages, and the Russian turcologist Èdgem Raximovich Tenishev (1921-2004), who visited the Yugur in July 1958.
      The language materials collected were published in subsequent years. In these publications, the authors do not mention their respective Russian and Chinese counterparts by name, perhaps a reflection of the political tension between Russia and China at that time.

Read a tribute on Tenishev's life and works by the Tatar Student Association of Moscow (external link, in Russian).

The first publication to appear from this expedition was an article by Tenishev on the Yugur clan names in 1962, followed by a short survey of both Western and Eastern Yugur, jointly edited with Buljash Xojchievna Todaeva, in 1966. A more detailed monograph on Western Yugur was published by Tenishev in 1976.

Léi Xuanchun, Chén Zongzhèn, and Zhong Jìnwén   Apparently due to political circumstances, it was only in the 1980s that the Chinese participants of the 1958 expedition started to publish on the Western Yugur language. Chén and Léi jointly published a grammar with vocabulary of Western Yugur, and they compiled a Western Yugur-Chinese dictionary containing some 7000 words, which appeared in 1992. Chén also wrote a substantial number of articles on Western Yugur.

It may not be surprising that the data in these recent Russian and Chinese publications show a considerable amount of overlap. The Western Yugur-Chinese dictionary furthermore contains many language materials from Malov.

In the 1990s, the American turcologist and mongolist Larry Clark published an article on the Western Yugur number system, and one reviewing Potanin's language materials. Together with the Chinese turcologist Geng Shimin, he prepared an overview article of the Western Yugur language, including a small number of texts collected by Geng.

Yugurologists in the field: Hans Nugteren, Marti Roos, and Zhong Jìnwén   The Dutch turcologists Marti Roos and Hans Nugteren of Leiden University, The Netherlands, prepared two articles on the loanwords of the Western and Eastern Yugur languages. Marti Roos now specializes in Western Yugur and Hans Nugteren in the Mongolic languages of Gansù and Qinghai.

They are priviliged by being able to collaborate with Zhong Jìnwén (Chongyl Yakhyr), who is a native speaker of Western Yugur, and is currently employed within the Institute of Literature and Arts of the Central University for Nationalities. Zhong Jìnwén published a synopsis of Yugur studies in 1995, containing an extensive bibliography.
      A first result of their collaboration is an article dealing with Yugur proverbs, excerpted from the older sources as well as recently collected ones.

Zhong Jìnwén   Zhong Jìnwén is the first of his nationality to obtain a doctoral degree. As he states in the Beijing Review:

"My parents died in my childhood. It was my elder brother who brought me up, and it was with financial help from the government that I could fulfil my college study. After graduating from Beijing Teachers' University, I was assigned to work with the Institute of Literature and Arts of the Central University for Nationalities, with focus on the research and systematization of the Yugur language. My research project has won high attention in academic circles. In 1996, I gained financial assistance from the Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation."

 

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