Mongolian Tsa and the Tibetan Layer of the Vocabulary

Tibetan is the language through which most of Mongolian Buddhism arrived, and its effect on Mongolian vocabulary is deep. Doctrinal terms, monastic offices, ritual objects, names of deities and titles of texts all came by that route, some translated into Mongolian and many simply taken over. The transfer was not phonetically neutral. Tibetan spelling preserves clusters that Tibetan itself no longer pronounces, and a Mongolian scribe copying a Tibetan word had to decide whether to write the spelling or the sound, which are different words.

Different periods and different translators answered differently, so the same term appears in Mongolian texts in more than one written form, and the variation is systematic enough to be a tool for dating and placing a manuscript. Tibetan remained a language of learning in Mongolian monasteries as well as a source of loanwords, so many texts are bilingual in practice, with Tibetan terms embedded in Mongolian sentences and written in Mongolian letters. Several of the added letters, this one among them, exist to make that possible with some accuracy rather than by approximation. The layer is thick enough that a reader working through a Mongolian Buddhist text without Tibetan will meet whole phrases that are Tibetan in everything but the shapes on the page.