Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platonic Papers, 27 (Aupt 3 1, 1991)
( %1'@ % ) , and fled with a group of Dungan followers across the
~ian Shan into Russian territory.
\Semirechlet is a Russian term meaning 'between the rivers'. The
name refers to the land that lies between the Amu Darya (Oxus
River) and the Syr Darya (Jaxartes River).
(13) Also under the terms of the 1881 Treaty of St. Petersburg,
the number of Russian consulates in the area were reduced to two,
and China was made to pay an indemnity of 9,000,000 rybles.
Following settlement of the treaty, the whole area of Chinese
Turkestan was in 1884 incorporated into China as the province of
Xinjiang, the 'New Frontiert.
(14) (Rimsky-Korsakoff 1967:355). When we were in Frunze
(~irghizstan) in 1990, we were urged to try some lttraditional
Kirghizw food. Two specialties we were told of were 'lakhman'
and \mantit. Only when our dinner was placed in front of us did
we realize that what we had ordered was 'lamianl (Jft&~) and
\mantout (@@)! The \mantouV however, was stuffed with meat,
in the form of \baoziv (4% 3 ) . (It would be interesting to
trace how \baozit have become \mantit in Central Asia). Although
Kirghiz locals and tourist literature describe such foods as
Ittraditional Kirghiz," Sushanlo (1971:169) refers to these as
"Dungan dishesm that are popular among the neighboring Kirghiz,
Kazakh, and Uzbek people. In Chinese, \la1 (8%) of \lamiant is a
rusheng ( A*$ ) character that ended with -t, and has been
reduced to a glottal stop in many Mandarin dialects. Apparently,.
use of the unvoiced velar fricative [x] in place of a glottal
stop in the word \lakhmant reflects the closest approximation of
the host language that borrowed the word.
(15) Dungan became an officially recognized language of the USSR
in 1929. The Gansu dialect forms the basis of the Dungan
literary language, which is written in Cyrillic script and taught
as a first language in local schools. Census data reveal that
there is little linguistic erosion among the Dungans: in 1979,
94.8% of the population gave Dungan (ItZhongyuan huafl) as their
mother tongue (Akiner 1983).
(16) According to Wixman (1984:60), the Dungan-Yage speak a
~ingxia-Lanzhou dialect of Mandarin, but share many cultural ties
with the Uighur nationality. In Russia, they live primarily in
the villages of Aleksandrovka, Sokuluk, and Chilik. Apparently,
the name \Yagel carries the pejorative meaning of \refugeet.