Mongolian edition in traditional script
4 hours ago
2024-12-22 1:52:04 AM UTC
2024-12-22 1:52:04 AM UTC
Thanks to a suggestion from zionius, I was able to procure a set of LOTR in traditional Mongolian script from kongfz.com via superbuy.com. It's not the first time I've used one seller to get books from a second seller that doesn't ship to the United States. (I've used Hanbooks in Los Angeles to get books from South Korea a couple of times.) There are no on-line translators from traditional Mongolian script (aka, Bichig) to English, and Lexilogos' traditional Mongolian script tool isn't 100% perfect, so this is easily one of the hardest LOTR translations to archive (because, being a linguist by trade, my archive heavily relies on native scripts). And that's not even including the fact that it's written vertically and never horizontally (even Traditional Chinese characters can be processed horizontally). Unicode's Bichig character set is oriented 90 degrees counterclockwise so that it can be written horizontally. You then have to rotate the text 90 degrees clockwise to read it vertically.
The set is one volume per book, so there are six volumes in the set. The volumes aren't numbered 1-6 and the cover art for each pair of volumes (FR, TT, RK) is identical so the only way to tell from the outside which volume is the odd-numbered book and which is the even-numbered one is a single word in Bichig in parentheses. Since there's no translator for Bichig into English and the Bichig to Cyrillic converters aren't very accurate, I finally ended up looking at the two volumes of Fellowship and looking for the Prologue, which in this set is numbered pages 1-24 and then the main text begins numbering at 1. I then looked at the Bichig words and identified the one that referred to the volume with the Prologue.
Fortunately, much of the standard bibliographic information is in Chinese in the back, so I know the names of the three pairs (at least the Chinese translation of the Mongolian), the translator, the publisher, the dates of publication, ISBN, etc.
This is one of the hardest-to-get translations and I've known about it for 15 years when I first saw it in Elrond's Library. (I can't thank zionius enough for pointing me to it as well as to a Hobbit in the same series. The first two volumes below have an image from the Hobbit movie, but they are Fellowship of the Ring and not the Hobbit.)
The set is one volume per book, so there are six volumes in the set. The volumes aren't numbered 1-6 and the cover art for each pair of volumes (FR, TT, RK) is identical so the only way to tell from the outside which volume is the odd-numbered book and which is the even-numbered one is a single word in Bichig in parentheses. Since there's no translator for Bichig into English and the Bichig to Cyrillic converters aren't very accurate, I finally ended up looking at the two volumes of Fellowship and looking for the Prologue, which in this set is numbered pages 1-24 and then the main text begins numbering at 1. I then looked at the Bichig words and identified the one that referred to the volume with the Prologue.
Fortunately, much of the standard bibliographic information is in Chinese in the back, so I know the names of the three pairs (at least the Chinese translation of the Mongolian), the translator, the publisher, the dates of publication, ISBN, etc.
This is one of the hardest-to-get translations and I've known about it for 15 years when I first saw it in Elrond's Library. (I can't thank zionius enough for pointing me to it as well as to a Hobbit in the same series. The first two volumes below have an image from the Hobbit movie, but they are Fellowship of the Ring and not the Hobbit.)
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