6th International Symposium Oriental Studies

The 6 th International Symposium on Oriental Ancient Documents Studies 26 Sergey Dmitriev Tangut-Chinese Glossary “Collection of Needful” (“Gather Desirable”) and Some Questions of the Representation of Chinese Text in the Tangut Script The Tangut language has a rather lucky afterlife. Fortunately, the Tangut scholars made various instruments, which can help to teach and properly un‑ derstand the Tangut language — and many of them happily are available for us. Admiring incomparable richness of etymological, thematic or phonetic glossaries, we have to accept that for many subjects we bitterly need a bilin‑ gual dictionary. It can give the only possibility to find the exact translations of specific, but very interesting categories of the Tangut language, as, for example, name of plants, animals, dishes, musical instruments etc., which are very hard to translated precisely using only context. That is why, one of the first publications on the Tangut language, made by Alexey Ivanov in 1909, was devoted to the most important bilingual glossary — “Pearl in the Palm”. But in reality, it’s not the only one Tangut-Chinese glossary: in the collection of the Saint-Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of Russian Acad‑ emy of Sciences we could find another Tangut-Chinese glossary, much less known — “Collection of needful” (“Gather desirable”). Besides of the very important information in some lexical fields, it’s a very interesting example of a rare way of presentation of Chinese text in the Tangut writing. It could be interpreted as a hypothetical prove of possibility to include any Chinese word (not only terms, toponymal or personal names — that we knew before) written in the Tangut script, into a Tangut text. It looks, I suppose, rather in‑ teresting from linguistic and historical point of view. Key words: Tangut-Chinese glossary, “Collection of needful”, Chinese text in the Tangut script, transcription.