Gerunds in the Old Turkic and Mongol versions of "The Hungry Tigress"
Claudia Römer, Vienna
The Golden Light Sutra contains the well-known story of Prince Mahasatva offering himself
up to a hungry tigress who is nearly starved and unable to feed her cubs. Among versions in
various other languages, there also exist a Mongol and an Old Uighur version (Schmidt 1831:
145-176 // v. Gabain 1974: 294-307, Çağatay 1945: 70-137). These two texts, which are very
close to each other in wording, offer an ideal possibility to study the use of gerunds in both
languages. Three issues will be discussed:
1) The different Turkic strategies of clause conjunction vs. hypotaxis (<B> gerunds and <A>
gerunds respectively), will be compared to their Mongolian equivalents.
2) The citation mechanisms of direct speech, which occurs abundantly in this text, will be
discussed.
3) Postverbal constructions will be briefly analysed.
Selected Bibliography:
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Erdal, M (1991): Old Turkic Word Formation. A Functional Approach to the Lexicon, 2 vols..
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Erdal, M. (2004): A Grammar of Old Turkic. Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 Uralic
& Central Asia. Leiden: Brill.
v.Gabain, A. (1974): Alttürkische Grammatik, 3. Aufl., Porta Linguarum Orientalium.
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Johanson, L. (1975): Some Remarks on “Turkic Hypotaxis”, Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher 47:
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Johanson, L. (1988): On the renewal and reinterpretation of “instrumental” gerunds in Turkic,
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Harrassowitz.
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