Turkish & Mongolian Loanwords

The Tibetan words here are, to transcribe them into Wylie, in order:  sku-bde-rigs, gang-zag, chol-kha, 'jam, thu-lum, na-so, no-kar, pag-shi, beg-tse, sbe-ka, tshan, she-mong, hor-dud, and am-chi.  I know the letters are small, so double-click on the image to enlarge it.

In times gone by, musk was the most popular Tibetan product in the whole world. Now that the musk deer is considered endangered it’s been replaced by synthetics, so much so that now Tibet’s biggest money maker is Buddhism, which seems to be facing the same fate. The Mongolian is kuderi, and the Tibetan borrowing of it gives it Tibetanizing spellings that make it seem to mean family of healthy bodies, but using very honorable language. Why would Tibetans ever think to borrow yet another word when they already had such a perfect one of their own for it, gla-ba? I have no idea.

Gang-zag is a tricky word, since its usual meaning is person (Sanskrit pudgala), not pipe.

I know I once claimed that sbe-ka had something to do with the Sanskrit word for frog, and now all of a sudden I’m contradicting myself finding an Old Mongolian origin for it in a word for wrestler. I admit I was probably wrong, although come to think of it I could have been right. For more on the frog read further.

You may well wonder what metal ingots might have to do with whole animal pelts. Well, even if you weren’t wondering: In ancient times in the Middle East and elsewhere, there was a practice of pouring molten metal into whole animal skins immersed in water. The result would be an ingot with four short legs that made the very heavy objects a lot easier to for two people to handle.

Emchi is nowadays a most common Tibetan word for physician, entirely suitable for addressing your doctor in person. Goldstein's dictionary even records the spelling em-rje, one of those cute (and endearing) Tibetanizing spellings since the 2nd syllable means lord, making it all that much more respectful.

I imagine all, or at least most, of these loanwords from Mongolian entered Tibetan during the time of the Mongolian Empire or at least not before. I doubt you will find any of them in the Dunhuang documents or other pre-Mongol period sources, but Tibetanists can test this for themselves at the OTDO.

Here is a photo of a horse-hair thug, a traumatic symbol of Mongolian terror in the late 12th-13th centuries that we mentioned in an earlier blog. Still today, Tibetans use it to mark the location of gönkhang chapels where fear is (ideally) taken onto the Path.

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The Tibetan words here are, to transcribe them into Wylie, in order:  khol-po, cog, chu-ba (or phyu-ba), 'cham, thug, sbal-kha, yol, gshang, and sag-ri.

Many of these words you see here, taken from Turkic languages, are not commonly encountered in Tibetan and a few are extremely rare (the names of Turkic gods, cog and yol only occur in long-forgotten Old Tibetan documents), although others such as chu-ba and 'cham are everyday words.

Here is a home video that shows you not only how to wrap your chuba, but throws in momo steaming as well. What a bargain! There is plenty of evidence for what early Uighur outfits looked like in donor portraits. Look here. Find a discussion of the word-connections for the clothing here (but please do correct the picture label there to read "Tibetan Chuba").

On the Turkic words for both the masked performers and the bell (just below), see Emel Esin's A History of Pre-Islamic and Early-Islamic Culture (Istanbul 1980), p. 107.

The gshang bell, used primarily by followers of Bön, but also by some Kagyü Lamas and spirit mediums, looks like this:

For the Tibetan word for that shagreen that helps you keep a nice and tight slip-free grip on knives and swords, have a look at this March 2009 blog entry of Sitahu where C.C. and I had a lot of fun discussing it. I have to say, I have nothing more to say about it, and I admit this much to my great chagrin.

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I’ve found that you can find a lot more Tibetan words lifted from Mongolian in a convenient list — with discussion — in the 2008 doctoral dissertation of Tóth Erzsébet (Elisabeth Toth), Mongol–Tibeti Nyelvi Kölcsönhatások (found online here), pp. 13-34. It’s interesting that the Tibetan name used in recent times for Russia, ཨུ་རུ་སུ་, was taken from Mongolian. It would appear that Rgya-ser/ རྒྱ་སེར་ ['Yellow Expanse'?] is the more genuinely Tibetan name for this northern vastness, but it, too, doesn’t seem to date back more than a few centuries, so I very much doubt it could have anything to do with the Khazars.  I think it could very well have something to do with the memory of the Golden Horde.

All these vocabulary connections are provisional and merit prolonged study, reflection and discussion.

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Postscript!  (January 18, 2015)

The more I travel the less I know. No need to search afar for something so close to home. These wise adages (or something close) are often repeated and never heeded. But I had a funny experience today that brought it all home for me. I was digging in the back of the refrigerator and came up with a good proof of that ages-old wisdom (wisdom being something I do believe can be found at home, after all). It's been ages since that change of flights in Istanbul, over a month now, but I found the leftovers of something purchased in the duty free there. I hope you won't be offended if I show it to you. I must warn you it is slightly smelly, but not in such a bad way:

Notice those words on the label “Tulum Peyniri.” That means ‘cheese’ (peyniri, evidently the same word you find in palak paneer!) made in a tulum. That’s right, this cheese was traditionally (at least) made inside of a complete skin of a four-legged animal, the same word tulum that Tibetans borrowed at one time or another. A search of the internet came up with this exact cheese, suggesting we ought to mix it with walnuts, and this turned out to be a very good idea. Go ahead and go here and read what it says. I couldn’t find any pictures of how the cheese is or was made in Turkey, although I did find some nice photos of Jordanian Bedouin women showing how it’s supposed to be done.  Go here and here (I didn’t want to swipe the photos, since it’s a commercial site intending to make money... Follow the links, but beware of buying!)

By the way, a quick search of the e-text repository at TBRC immediately turned up 272 matches for ཐུ་ལུམ་ (thu-lum). So it is a word that is encountered in Tibetan literature from time to time (I’ve encountered it mainly in colophons... I remember I once mistranslated it as ‘cannonball.’  Live and learn. See you later. Take it easy.).

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Oh, I forgot to say that tulum is also a modern Turkish word for the bagpipe. I imagine it has something to do with the way they used to be made. And we really shouldn't leave the subject of inflatable skin bags (a subject that has been interesting me lately for other reasons) without mentioning their use for floating on the water. There is a remarkable Assyrian frieze depicting a man using a skin bag for floating in the water supposed to date from circa 800 BCE.  And the use of flotation devices is well known from Tibetan travel accounts, and in older Tibetan literature we have the very interesting Tibetan words rkyal (རྐྱལ་) used both for the float and for the storage bag and phyal (ཕྱལ་) more with the meaning of a float or a buoy.* To judge from the Englished version, the preparation of flotation devices for crossing rivers was something Padampa used as a metaphor for helping other people to get beyond suffering.**

(*The Rangjung Yeshe Wiki entries I've linked for you don't have either of these meanings with the meanings I've given for them, but that ought to be no great cause for surprise or concern. Longchenpa loved to use the word phyal metaphorically for floating freely with nothing to hold you in place.  **Blue Annals, Roerich tr., p. 922; but now that I check the original text, there is no word for any flotation device there.  It uses the word skya-gdos, སྐྱ་གདོས་, a compound of the words for oars and mast, both of them locomotive rather than flotation devices.  Which goes to show, it can be a problem to rely on translations, even when done by humans as competent as Gendun Choephel, who used the same woodblock printing of the Blue Annals as I do. So don't blame the different readings on variant readings.)