Charles Roskelly Bawden FBA, Emeritus Professor of Mongolian in the University of London, author of The Modern History of Mongolia and Shamans, Lamas and Evangelicals: The English Missionaries in Siberia, is that rara avis: a distinguished scholar well aware of the need to be practical, useful to a wide spectrum of readers and relevant to current preoccupations and desiderata.
Compiled over some 30 years with the help of six named Mongolian scholars and of the State University of Mongolia, this extensive work eschews the use of earlier dictionaries (so often productive of error and misdirection) as a source for keywords. Instead, Bawden has built his dictionary on reading contemporary publications and extracting words and phrases from them, “with the joint aims of avoiding the straitjacket of a pre‐set pattern of entries, of including only living vocabulary, and of trying to record current meanings”.
Bawden’s sources range very widely from newspapers and popular magazines to specialist handbooks of arts, sciences and technology. Some fiction is included. His trawl has resulted in “rather more than 26,000 main entries and an uncounted number of subsidiary entries”.
With all his other virtues, Bawden is also modest, apologizing for “the incomplete nature of my knowledge” and the possibility of errors. He may rest easy. He has followed “the wise principle enunciated by Father Antoine Mostaert in respect of his Dictionnaire Ordos of excluding everything which appeared uncertain”. What is included is quantitatively impressive and qualitatively superb.
Mongolian headwords, arranged in alphabetical order (whether consisting of one or more elements) and printed in bold Cyrillic script, are followed, rather palely in sans serif type, by equivalents in English. There are numerous and useful illustrations of usage. Homonyms are distinguished by Roman numerals; ranges of meaning of individual words by Arabic numerals. Pronunciation is not indicated, the implicit assumption being made that the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet brings one close to reasonably acceptable formal articulations. I feel that Bawden is right in following this economical course, as, too, in his decision to exclude etymologies and any description of word formation. Basic knowledge of both Mongolian and English on the part of the user is assumed. The very many, recent loanwords from Russian, especially in technical literature, are usually still recognizable as such and their origins and sense apparent. So Bawden has sensibly only included such loanwords when he felt that it “might be useful to do so”. In my view, any other course would have swamped the indigenous lexicon, to little useful end.
More than 50 years have gone by since the Russian Cyrillic script was adapted to the Mongolian alphabet, ousting the indigenous script in all everyday contexts and pursuits. Variations in spelling can still be found. Bawden includes some of these alternative spellings. Though Bawden’s prime intention has been to keep pace with the reflection in language of a rapidly evolving political and social situation in today’s Mongolia, his dictionary also covers the often idiosyncratic and always distinctive terminologies and stylistic usages of the erstwhile Mongolian People’s Republic (1924‐92) in considerable detail.
This is a well presented scholarly dictionary admirably suited to the practical needs of busy people concerned with today’s Mongolian society and culture as they change. It is worth every penny (or cent) of its substantial price, and is essential stock for academic libraries with Asian collections.
