Muqaddimat al-adab

The famous dictionary Muqaddimat al-adab was compiled in the 12th century as an arabian-persian-turkic triglossa by an arabian scholar al-Zamahshari. Supposingly in the year 1492 the Turkic and the Mongolian parts were attached to this manuscript.

This mongolian part was thoroughly investigated by N.Poppe who published in 1938 the book named 'Mongol`skij slovar` Mukaddimat al-adab'. It contains mongolian and turkic lexicon and the description of the mongolian language used in the dictionary.

Mukaddimat al-adab unlike other monuments in Western Middle Mongolian dialect contains not only single words but enourmous number of sentences and this is of a special value for the mongolian studies.

  • Here is the first edition by Poppe:
    Н.Н. Поппе, Монгольский словарь Мукаддимат ал-адаб, часть 1-2 //Труды Института Востоковедения, XIV, Москва-Ленинград, 1938
  • Yoshio Saito presents his monumental work with critical edition of Muqaddimat al adab:
    Yoshio Saito, The Mongolian words in the Muqaddimat al-Adab: Romanized Text and Word Index, Tokyo 2008 (845 pp).