CHINESE MULTILINGUALISM - YUNLU (ed.).

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Qinding tongwen yuntong ("Imperially Commissioned Manual of Transliteration"). Second imperially sanctioned edition, first printing, of this quadrilingual work conceived by the Qianlong emperor, China's Louis XIV, to standardize transliterations between Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and Manchu. This edition was published by the court's Office of Territorial Affairs after the layout of the 1750 first edition. Both are now rare: we have traced complete copies of the present version at Columbia and SOAS only, as well as one with a variant title page printed in red at Princeton. The harmonization of disparate languages was at the centre of the Qing dynasty's system of political control and its promotion of cultural influences from India and Mongolia. "Using tables and glosses, the book systematically gave Chinese equivalents to letter combinations found in Tibetan and Sanskrit... Since Chinese characters, as single syllables, could not precisely represent the consonant clusters found in Tibetan and Sanskrit, the book's editors devised a system of combining up to three Chinese characters into a single compound 'character' that, if pronounced as a single syllable according to certain rules, would theoretically mimic the multi-consonant syllables of other languages. The attempt to shoehorn Chinese into an alphabetic mould in the pursuit of phonetic correctness, without attention to the difficulties these innovations would pose for all but a trained elite, is characteristic of Qianlong

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