Talk:Pentaglot Dictionary

Initial translator's notes
Translated at the request of. This is not at all within my area of expertise, so translation errors may be unavoidable. --Nlu (talk) 21:47, 5 August 2014 (UTC)


 * First, compliments for the nice, helpful translation. I tried to do some reediting and restructuring which is obviously not completely satisfactory. For some edits, I made summaries that indicate how they could be revised. Then, though, I didn’t understand the following lines and would be grateful for a clarification:


 * For some terms, synonyms were included in the target languages (except Chinese). Thus, there are 19503 terms used in Mongolian corresponding to 18145 terms in Chinese (with 526 synonyms noted in Chinese). - This is already slightly modified by me, but if no synonyms were included into Chinese, how can Chinese have 526 synonyms noted?
 * to allow two-way transliteration and using distinctive characters for initial and medial phonemes
 * G Purevdorj (talk) 09:29, 29 October 2014 (UTC)


 * can you explain what this means or rewrite it in the article?Rajmaan (talk) 19:47, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
 * G Purevdor, the Chinese Wikipedia article is not clear on this subject, and I simply directly translated (as best as I could understand it). I am guessing (but it's at best an educated guess) that what it means is this: A, in Manchu, might be defined as X in Chinese, and then the next entry would be B in Manchu, and the Chinese entry would simply be, "See above."  (I tried to take a quick look at the PDF files for an example so that I can educate myself better on this, but I couldn't find one immediately.)  --Nlu (talk) 15:16, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, you got the correct idea. Here is my translation, hope it helps: 1998年民族出版社《鉴》再版发行. 总计有约18671个单词，共4973页. 其中除满汉二文以外，有在单词词条旁边附注同义词的现象. 例如蒙文词条加上这些同义词则总计约19503个单词. 汉语部分约计有18145个单词，另有526个同上注文（“漢語同上”、“漢語亦同上”、“漢語同上連用”）. In 1998, the Ethnic Publishing House republished the Pentaglot Dictionary. This edition contained a total of approximately 18671 lemmas on 4973 pages. With the exception of the Manchu and Chinese sections, the other three languages all contained entries with synonyms noted beside the lemma. For example, a count of the synonyms for the Mongolian lemmas together with the lemmas themselves, would put the total number of Mongolian entries at 19503. For the Chinese section, there are approximately 18145 entries, and an additional 526 notes of ibidem ("the Chinese [translation] is as above", "the Chinese [translation] is also as above", "the Chinese [translation] is as above when used as a compound word"). --Shibo77 (talk) 04:32, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Article name
I am skeptical that a Chinese title of a dictionary that ultimately refers to a dictionary of Manchu as a source language is appropriate. Thus, the Manchu title would make more sense to me. Alternatively, the English title (as "Pentaglott") might be a more neutral solution. What do the others think? G Purevdorj (talk) 09:34, 29 October 2014 (UTC)


 * The Chinese title is a direct equivalent of the other titles- "Qingwen" 清文 was used by the Qing to refer to the Manchu language as I noted in the article. It was the preferred rendering of Manchu langage by the Qing government in Chinese insead of "Manwen" 滿文. People unfamiliar with the terminology may be mislead into thinking it just says "Qing (written language)" which would be the literal translation of Qingwen. In the Manchu version of the Treaty of Nerchinsk Manchu is referred to as Dulimbai Gurun i Bithe (Middle Kingdom written language) 中國文. It has several names. The article should be called the "Pentaglot Dictionary".


 * I also think that the use of the name Uyghur is anachoristic as I brought this topic up before on other Uyghur language related articles, I think it should be foremost be called Chagatai and (Modern Uyghur) be placed in parentheses where needed because the current article is going to confuse people as to the relationship between Uyghur and Chagatai.


 * Also if you know anything about Japanese copyright law, this website contains the full PDF files of the Pentaglot Dictionary. Does Japanese law allow people to upload public domain books to Wikimedia commons? (Is the website automatically giving consent by displaying it publically for download) Or do we have to send an email to the website and ask them for permission? I'm interested in uploading the full dictionary to wikimedia commons and displaying it here.Rajmaan (talk) 22:14, 30 October 2014 (UTC)


 * 1. Pentaglot with a single t, ok. 2. "Post-classical Chagatai", then? 3. Dunno, but downloaded the dictionary :-). If I now had one of the index volumes by Corff et al., I could start using it as a Manchu-Mongolian dictionary ;-). Don't even have Hauert myself ... G Purevdorj (talk) 12:20, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Manuscripts and editions
Hallo Rajmaan! I really appreciate adding links to facsimiles, but the way you're doing it now is highly repetitive and completely uninformative to anyone not familiar with Chinese. One way one might do it would be to have a table, or to use e.g. 御製滿珠蒙古漢字三合切音清文鑑 (plus transcription and translation) as a headline and then just list the links by 1, 2, 3 (rather than 卷一, 卷二). Such listing could then be done in a row, so that the "length" of the article is not artificially blown up. And it would give more prominence to the headings: just now, I simply don't know what kinds of materials are present if I only take a short look. G Purevdorj (talk) 21:35, 2 December 2014 (UTC)