u/i_am_not_obuna

Chinggismaxxing

A few months ago I asked about where to buy physical Mongolian script books online. I didn't get answers, but I dug around a bit and found some - You can search for "蒙古文" on Taobao and you can find many sellers and books. They key is to install the app and keep it in Chinese, if you change it to English the Mongolian books stop appearing. So lots of Google Translate and Google Lens-ing later, I managed to buy and ship a box full of books to myself.

So in the spirit of "you can just do things", I set a goal to read a book in Mongolian script this year, and managed to finish the Inner/Southern Mongolian translation of the Little Prince.

Some observations:

• The translation is unmistakably Southern because of the word and grammar choices. The first sentence starts: "Зургаан настайдаа би 'Битүү ойн бартаат тэмдэглэл' хэмээх ой тайгын тухай өгүүлсэн номноос нэгэн гайхалтай зураг олж үзсэн юм" (бартаат тэмдэглэл?). Compare this translation from the north: "Би зургаан настай байхдаа “Амьдарсан түүх” гэдэг аглаг ойн тухай номоос гайхамшигт сайхан зураг үзэж билээ".
• Lots of sort-of outdated and different terminology, though its all understandable from context. For example нисгэл instead of нисэх онгоц, аж ахуй instead of эдийн засаг, дундад instead of хятад, the term "ман могой" for boa constrictor etc.
• No use of traditional Mongolian numbers, only Arabic numerals are used
• Some words seem to be spelled differently. For example Ид шид seems to be spelled ridi-sidi, in Mongolia it's just idi-si without the r in front (ᠢᠳᠢ ᠰᠢᠳᠢ). Same with буу - which is spelled пуу in this book.
• The page headers all have (even and odd pages) "Le petit prince" in French and "Бяцхан хан хөвгүүн" in Cyrillic. Funnily though the book was published in China the only Chinese in the book is the final ISBN book information page.
• It's still pretty hard to read foreign names (Sahara desert etc)

All in all a great experience and while it was a slow start I could feel myself getting faster at reading every chapter. 10/10 recommend.