Pons/Monsudar: Basiswörterbuch Deutsch-Mongolisch Mongolisch-Deutsch

This is a pocket dictionary I got as a present just a few days ago. The Mongolian title is Гэрман-Монгол Монгол-Гэрман өврийн толь бичиг. It has 1102 pages, the format is roughly 16x9x4 centimeters, the price was reportedly 10.000 or 20.000 (can't remember) Tugriks.

The size is extremely practical, especially if you compare it with the books edited by the late Mr. Vietze. The cover looks solid enough, and at the low price the occasional stain will feel much less bad. I especially like the very clear layout.

There are also a few things I did not like. First of all, my copy, reportedly bought in the Ih Delguur, came with some missing pages (259-264, should contain words like "Geländewagen"). This may be just poor luck, it may also be a problem with quality management.

The authors seem to have started with some standardized German word list, looked for Mongolian translations, and then turned the list around. As a result, the dictionary is quite poor on words that are more common in Mongolia-related contexts than elsewhere. Words that I looked for in vain in the German-Mongolian part include Jurte, Kaschmir, Korea, Tugrik, Somon, Aimak, Innere Mongolei, Äußere Mongolei, Wodka. For Lama, the only translation given is лам гөрөөс, which is the Mongolian term for a camel-related species in southern America, not for the people who live in Mongolian monasteries. Strangely enough, the Mongolian equivalents for some, but not all, of these German words are existent in the Mongolian-German part of the dictionary.

Words that were absent from the Mongolian-German part of the dictionary include хуушуур, цуйван, хорхог, фургон, хайнаг, хулан, тахь (алаг тахь is included, though), улаан булан, дундад улс, Ар Монгол, Солонгос and probably a few more I can't remember. I guess the picture is clear enough, though.

There are a few minor points, like that the info box about culture, the country and its people, as advertised on the back cover, is nowhere to be found, that the Mongolian abbreviations used in the Mongolian-German part are never explained, that the proofreading on the manual page for the Mongolian-German part was apparently not thorough enough, or that the transcription page seems a bit strange. ц=c? з=z for German readers?

Generally, I believe that the omissions mentioned above can be worked around. Most of those words require an explanation rather than a translation: if you know what it is, you probably also know what it is called in Mongolian. In an German-English dictionary, such limitations would of course be unacceptable. For German-Mongolian dictionaries, the word "embarassing" might fit better.

With the caveat that I did not check the less Mongolia-specific vocabulary, I'd give this dictionary an overall mark of 3.5 of five, but mostly because of its small size, the layout and its price. Without these factors, the mark should be closer to 2 of five, on account of the missing vocab and missing pages.

Mongolian Kazakhs in Kazakhstan

thetys.caoss.org, a German-language blog dedicated to Central Asia, has a very interesting article by Henryk Alff on Kazakhs from Mongolia in Kazakhstan. The author has written his master thesis on just this topic, so about the only downside to the article seems to be his brevity. For anyone who does not read German, some key points are

• Before the 1990s, Kazakhs in Mongolia were very much isolated from Kazakhstan
• Between 1991 and 1993, about 40% of Mongolia's Kazakhs, or 60,000 people, moved to Kazakhstan. However, many of them returned to Mongolia later,
• Significant problems were that Kazakhs from Mongolia were that they spoke no Russian, did not gain Kazakh citizenship (huh?), were looked down upon as lazy and uncultivated, were initially settled in the disintegrating agrarian enterprises from socialist times, and lacked access to the local social networks,
• However, in the last years the number of immigrants has risen again. Kazakhs from Mongolia have found social niches, and a good share of new immigrants can rely on support from relatives who migrated to Kazakhstan earlier. Kazakhs from Mongolia today often live near or in the cities, working in trade, construction, or as craftspeople.
  

Hans-Peter Vietze

According to www.mongolei.de, Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Vietze died on Oct. 9th. He is most well-known for his edition of "the" Mongol-German and German-Mongol dictionaries (notwithstanding the earlier work of Johannes Schubert). In recent years, he worked a lot as translator, on official occasions like state visits, or at the Berlinale. I, and probably most Mongolians in Germany, remember him best for working for the police at Berlin-Tegel airport.

Some people I know well used to call him, half-jokingly, a spy, because he had an eye for illegal immigrants, and always appeared as the friendly old man. He was part of the Tegel experience just like the chaos in front of the check-in counter, the stressed-out check-in clerks having a cigarette in some corner, and the joy of meeting someone arriving from Mongolia cf. the emotions when accompanying someone to the airport, or the stress of finding someone who would take some stuff to Ulaanbaatar. He did of course look elderly, but definitely in good health. Uudraa would sometimes make fun of his accent. Once or twice he even said Hello to Uudraa - maybe because she already looked familiar, or because he remembered her from the one time Uudraa had a problem with immigration, or from the time when she first entered Germany. At that time, he greeted all of the newly-arrived exchange students, and asked them to show their dictionary - part of his job at immigration, I suppose. Uudraa was the only one who produced a pirated copy. But Mr. Vietze just smiled. 

The best reminder of Prof. Vietze is probably the success of his dictionaries.   A revised edition of both the German-Mongol and the Mongol-German dictionaries was published early this year, and pirated copies of older editions are easily available in UB. When learning languages like English, French, or Chinese, the existence of good dictionaries is often taken for granted, but it is with the languages that only few dictionaries exist for that you realize how valuable they really are.

my take on the results of the election

Note: This is not much more than a personal rant. For serious information, eyewitness accounts, etc. try here, here, here, here, or your favourite news site. For some additional pictures, try here or here.

When I went to work this morning, I met my neighbour in the lift. He immediatly asked what is up with Mongolia - he knows where Uudraa is from - and I, half jokingly, replied that one of the parties was set up because they lost the elections. At that point I did not yet know that people had been killed.

Let me first point out that I am extremely cynical towards the claims of the DP. They found out that they fared worse than expected, and began throwing around accusations. This is no unfamiliar pattern, the MPRP in 2004 did roughly the same. The night after the election the DP had still been confident that they might succeed even in places like Zavhan or Uvs. I still remember the post from the currently shutdown olloo.mn website, with the invitation to watch the Eurocup finals at the DP Headquarters. Just too bad they apparently did not realize how the German team did not accuse the Spaniards or the referee of cheating, and how the German fans did not start to riot.

Is this a conflict between communism and democracy, or corruption and transparency? Hardly. At best it is a fight between two groups of businessmen. At least this time Erel and Buyan won't have their seats in parliament. Golomt seems to have made it, though. Unfortunately, I have to agree with bilguun at asiangypsy that this turn of events is not entirely surprising. With parties that, even if hardly distinct, treat each other like the scum of the earth and are always happy to accuse each other of every possible kind of malice - at least so long as they do not form a coalition - it's no surprise that supporters get carried away at some point. Add a number of (probably) bored young men and alcohol, and political hooliganism seems not so much out-of-place.

As for the riots themselves, it seems as if this could all have been better contained by a police better trained and equipped for crowd control. It might also have helped if some of the "leaders" had gone out and tried to defuse the situation. I have seen this work in Germany, I don't think it would have made the situation worse in Mongolia. But maybe they were not sufficiently confident of their leadership qualities.*

What else can one say? I just hope people begin to realize that mudslinging and violence are no ways of conflict resolution in democratic society, and that the country one day gets honest and competent leaders.

For those who read German, someone has posted a much more enjoyable rant here.

*Update July 5th: In a letter previously posted on Thomas Terry's blog, Elbegdorj said that he actually spoke to protesters four times - but apparently to those on Sükhbaatar Square, not to those in front of the MPRP building.

Last sentence ("For those who read German ...") slightly rephrased for clarity.

Elections!

Mongolia's next elections are scheduled for the 29th this month. Some serious and competent commentary can be found at Asiangypsy. The last parliamentary elections led to mutual accusations of fraud in some electorates, and the Democratc Party is already starting to voice some prophylactic objections. The General Election Comission, on the other hand, has now given the data of all potential voters to the parties, and also made each citizen's data available on its website: If you know your registration number (either from your birth certificate or from your I.D. card) and your name, you can find out where you are registered, what your birthday is etc. Of course with Mongolia's generally, let's say, pragmatic attitude towards paperwork, I won't rule out that there may be people with more than one registry number. On the other hand it seems hard to say how this would affect the outcome of the election. Btw. the GEC website also let's you 'vote' on proportional vs. majority voting system.

Uudraa lives abroad.

I personally find the election campaigns budgets of the candidates especially interesting. They were capped at several hundred million MNT (several hundred thousand USD) per electorate district earlier this year, which should break down to several USD (5$ ?) per voter. At my last-but-one district to Mongolia in late summer 2006, we witnessed some of the by-election campaign in electorate 46, western Hövsgöl. The incumbent MP of the region, from the DP, had died, and now the MPRP and, to a letter extent, the other parties poured in rather large amounts of capital in order to convince people to elect their candidate. Our visit at Uudraa's grandmother, whose summer encampment is roughly half-way between Bürentogtoh sum center and Sangiin Dalai nuur, was just in the days running up to the election. Several jeeps from the different parties would visit grandma-in-law, and most of them would leave some small present.

A DP campaign convoy. Uudraa's father did not want to come closer. He is a prominent MPRP member in the area and did not want them to see him in the company of some suspicious foreigner.

Gündalai's People's Party left a bowl with the face of Chinggis Khan, the Democratic Party left a big insulation can that features prominently on most of the pictures I made these days. The Irgenii Zorig Nam only reminded that she and Grandma were old acquaintances, appealed to female solidarity, and left a ticket for a disco in the sum center, but the MPRP would, on several occasions, hand out a total of 40.000 MNT, plus two glossy magazines, one for children and one for juveniles.

Let's fight honestly! (DP poster, Mörön)

On the morning of election day, Uudraa's grandmother was visited by three men on two bikes, to collect her vote. They and Grandma were joking around a bit, and - just for me, I guess - conducted the voting process in an especially correct manner, with Grandma making her cross behind the curtains of her bed. Of course they knew each other, and probably also knew at which party Grandma made her cross.

The MPRP candidate, Ö. Enhtuvshin, was the one who won this by-election. It would be easy to ascribe it all to the amount of presents given to the voters, but Enhtuvshin is also much more prominent within the MPRP than the DP candidate was within his party. He would be more likely be able to effect certain perks for his voters, like connection of the sum centers to electricity and cell phone networks. As far as I know, this connections to electricity and cell phone services are now largely completed, though I am not sure if this is really all due to Enhtuvshin.

Short tale from the Soviet Union

Or, more precisely, about some visitors to the Soviet Union: It was in the 1980s when my grandmother and some coworkers from her LPG (East German agricultural cooperative, roughly equivalent to negdels in Mongolia or kolkhozes in the USSR) for made a touristic trip to Leningrad. I'm not sure about the background, it may have been some kind of award, or they just wanted to go there.

In any case, in these days foreign tourists in the Soviet Union, even from socialist brother countries, were usually kept under watch, only led around in groups, only allowed to see what they were supposed to see etc. My grandmother's group came from a Mecklenburgian village and for some rather natural reason also were interested to see what villages, or agricultural cooperatives, in Russia looked like. But when they asked their guide if this would be possible, she flatly rejected, and quite angrily.

The conclusion left was rather devastating - "they are so ashamed of their villages that they can not even show us one". East German villages were never particularly tidy, and some of the male members of the group might have seen Russian villages back in WWII, so the impression probably was all the worse. In any case, I am sure that what their relatives remember to this day are not the pictures brought home from the trip (nice or not, altered or not, wrongly labeled or not), but the information that the Russians were so embarassed by the state of their countryside that they did not dare to show it to East German visitors.

Tömörbulag

I actually did not see much on last year's trip to Mongolia. Once in Mörön, I was rather lazy, tried to learn a bit for university, lent Uudraa and her parents a hand one or two times, or watched Sumo in the afternoon. One evening Uudraa and I would go to some free concert - the motto was "Our Future" - in Mörön's stadium, mainly because Mongolian schlager is always nice to listen too. But we got cold early and the music was not as groovy as we had hoped for, so we returned home and then only heard boos and whistles in the distance, from the apparently not-so-amused audience. Some days later we saw a recording of the show at a local TV channel, the problem obviously was that the organizers of the show insisted on interrupting the music shows with speeches by a rather zealous - Uudraa immediatly compared him with Kim Il Sung - Korean missionary. I guess that his words had to be translated into Mongolian did not help, as did saying that Mongolia was so poor because her citizens were no Christians.

Of course we would visit quite a number of Uudraa's relatives, and we also made two-three daytrips to the autumn encampment of Uudraa's grandmother. But there was almost no bigger excursion, as Uudraa did not have the time and I was reluctant to venture out without her.

On the one excursion we did make we were kind of freeloaders, the entourage of Uudraa's aunt. She is some darga (boss) in the aimag's women's association, and in this function she had been invited to join the celebration for the 70th anniversary of Tömörbulag's sum hospital. I think showing us around was actually the main reason for the aunt to go there. Tömörbulag is a sum about 75 km southeast of Mörön in the Bügsiin gol valley, or just across the Erchim nuruu ridge. The road across this ridge is not very difficult, but the last kilometers to the pass are quite steep, and we had had a small accident there three years ago (469 tipped over, no injuries). This time all went rather fine, and Uudraa circled the ovoo on the pass three times and offered some cookies just in case it might help some day.

some photogenic hills in the evening sun

The sum center itself was remarkably tidy. Tömörbulag's specialty is a certain sort of cashmere goats, and apparently this does pay off. The hospital was a two-storey building, with something like 20 rooms (very rough estimate). We were given a room at the end of the upper floor, complete with heaps of sweets and dairy products, a bucket of airag and a bowl of arkhi (the milk variant). The hospital had also ordered vodka bottles with a commemorative label, but I don't remember if we had any in our room at this time. I also don't really remember what we had for diner, probably Buuz, Bansh or Khushuur.

A programme had been organized for this anniversary, and after dinner we went to the local Ulaan Bulan (Mongolian equivalent to the Culture Houses in other formerly pro-Soviet countries). Uudraa's aunt took her place on the stage, together with other present officials and a lama. The place was really full, and we returned to our room in the hospital to get us some stools. The official programme began with a prayer of the lama - the sum mayor explained afterwards that since the celebration was related to health and well-being, they thought this was a good idea - and afterwards the hospital staff were honored, given awards and presents: rice cookers, DVD players and the like. Tömörbulag was not connected to Mongolia's power grid, but apparently the people hoped this would happen soon, or they had strong solar cells. I assume the former though, as the local MP is B. Erdenebat, back then the minister in charge of the power lines. Then, the officials handed out their presents, Uudraa's aunt had brought some decorative picture - just the same picture as the representative of the Democratic Party, whose turn fortunately was after Uudraa's aunt's. One of the hospital staff had apparently been gone over, as afterwards a man from the public took the microphone and complained that this doctor had always done a good job, and just because he is from Dornod is no excuse to ignore him. He got quite a deal of applause.

The cultural part of the programme was carried out by the hospital staff, pupils of the local school, and by a singer who had decided to start his tour across the sums of Hövsgöl just the following day and in Tömörbulag. Afterwards, there was supposed to be a disco, but Uudraa and I decided to first bring the stools back to the hospital - not that they had helped us much, anyway - and we never made it back to the Ulaan Bulan.

Back in our room, Uudraa's aunt had begun to chat and have a drink with some of our hosts - I think we may have brought one or two vodka bottles from Mörön, just in case - and we thought it would be a bit rude not to attend. Gradually, the room filled with ever more people, until there were about twenty-five, including the singer and the representative of the Democratic Party. Thus it was really out of the question to leave, and we just took part in the celebration and enjoyed ourselves as well as we could. From time to time I would go outside, under the excuse of taking a leak, but also to catch some cold fresh air and get my head a bit clearer. The corridor then always looked as if a search party was roaming around, with numbers of flashlights hushing through the darkness. The hospital had two electric circuits, one probably 220V, powered by a diesel (?) generator, and the other one probably 12 or 24V, powered by solar cells. But the diesel generator was now needed for the celebration at the Uulan Bulan, and the solar power stored in the batteries ran low rather fast. The lights would go off for five minutes, then work again for some time. But the intervalls during which they worked got ever shorter, and those during which they did not work ever longer, and in the end we lit candles.

At around three o'clock a.m. I decided to find some place to sleep. I left under the excuse that I would need to go outside once more, and then returned not to our room, but found an unlocked examination room and lay myself on the stretcher. The Democratic representative had actually indicated a desire to discuss some issues with me, but to this I could not pay attention now. I did not even pay attention when Uudraa, fearing I had been lost, started to look for me, and only when they started a systematic search of all rooms did they find me and place me in some other bed.


The next morning, we all had a slight hangover, although having not slept much was probably the bigger problem for Uudraa and me. Uudraa's aunt as honoured guest of course had it harder, but she coped remarkably well. The democrat had forgot his glasses in our room, and she could not hide some Schadenfreude (the paternal part of Uudraa's family is rather pro-MPRP). The celebrations had in fact only begun, there were horse races and a wrestling competition, and for lunch we went up into the mountains and had a picknick. We could have stayed for another night, watch the opening concert of the singer's Hövsgöl tour and maybe make some more acquaintances, but Uudraa's aunt preferred to return to Mörön, and so after we had filled the remaining airag into a canister, and after Uudraa's aunt had had a last row of drinks with the hospital's head nurse, we said goodbye to or hosts and drove back to Mörön.

The father of S. Bayar, the current Prime Minister of Mongolia, apparently hails from Tömörbulag. But back then, Bayar was, if anything, a man of the future, and the hospital's 469 was a present by Erdenebat, as could be read on the car's door.

From the bookshelf: P. Hulova, Kurzer Abriss meines Lebens in der mongolischen Steppe (A short story of my life in the Mongolian steppe), Munich 2007

This book is actually not from my own bookshelf. I bought it as a desparate present for my mother when Christmas was approaching, and she had stated that she would like to go to Mongolia one day, too, so I thought giving a novel about Mongolian women was not the worst possible choice.

Petra Hůlová is a Czech author, just a few months older than me. She published the book  in Czech in 2002, which happens to be the year in which I made my first trip to Mongolia - in fact, the first time I travelled abroad on my own. I know I was very young back then, but then I was always quite of nerdy and we all know that girls grew up quicker. The cover text points out that Mrs. Hulova studied Mongolian and spent several months in the country, but in this interview she implicitely states that she actually had Czech rather than Mongolian characters in mind when writing the book, and I think this does shine out a bit.

The novel tells the fates of five women from one family: three sisters, the mother, and the daughter of one of the sisters. They seem to be originally from Bayanhongor, but three of them spend most of the book in Ulaanbaatar. The story is set in a kind of time hole, a strange mixture of socialism and late 1990s, extended to a period of 40-50 years, during which the sisters grow up, have children themselves, and become old. This setting is of course a rather obvious detour from history, on the other hand it makes the story more focused on the characters of the protagonists instead on outside events, and to me this worked.

There are some other detours from reality that IMO did not work so well or were just unnecessary, like that in real life, naadam races are for distinguished by the age of the horses, not of the riders. And there were some inconsistencies - more inconsistent than the average first person narrator, anyway - but this may be due to the translation. For example it is almost impossible not to conclude that the Nadaam in which Magi competes is in Ulaanbaatar. Two specific points of critique are the translations of "Kulturní dům" (Uulan Bulan in Mongolian) to "Kulturzentrum" - the proper socialist term here is Kulturhaus - and of whatever "bowl" means in Czech to "Lavoir" - many German readers will probably interpret this as another Mongolian term, not as Austrian for an ordinary "Schüssel". I also was not entirely convinced of the use of untranslated Mongolian words. I of course know what hüühdiin tsetserleg, nohoi, manjin etc. mean, but I don't see what is gained from not just writing kindergarten, dog, and so on. And furgons are called furgon in Mongolian, not kibitka (or is kibitka an untranslated czech word here)?

To cut the bitching, I actually liked the book. The characters were interesting, the text read well, and the book is far from being completely off. It may not be the great novel about Mongolia in the 1990s, but it definitely is a nice change from Weeping Camels and Yellow Dogs. Not that there is anything wrong with these, and without this franchise we might not have seen a translation of this work into German. Last not least the outer cover is quite a beauty, both for the material used and for the picture.

I don't expect this book to help my mother understand Mongolia - or, only in the sense that Franz Kafka's Great Wall stories help developing a basic understanding of China.* But worth reading it is.

Price: 9 Euro (cheaper if "used")
Rating: 4/5

* I actually always felt that Kafka's works helped me a lot in understanding the most important things about China. Not necessarily the Great Wall stories, but The Verdict, maybe also the Metamorphosis and The Castle, and others. My brother is now in Slovakia and he sais that Kafka goes a long way towards understanding that country, too!

A furgon ride

My 2007 visit to Mongolia was somewhat accidental: By early July, Uudraa decided that she would have to fly home at the end of the month in order to help with her family's business, and in mid-August - I had worked for two weeks at a construction site in Grafenwöhr, Bavaria - I decided that my funds were sufficient for following her. That is, I had enough money for a plane ticket to Beijing and back, plus the visas and the expenses for overland travelling between Beijing and Mörön. I was a bit lucky that plane tickets (with Emirates, after all) were still available at a very reasonable price. Everything worked extremely well, and four days after setting out from Berlin I reached UB at the very end of August.

Uudraa and I had taken the same route - sleeper bus to Ereen, UAZ 469 across the border, train to UB - on our two other visits to Mongolia, and the route taken on my first visit to Mongolia had also been quite similar, so the ease of getting to Ulaanbaatar was not really surprising. I was, however, somewhat surprised just how much I liked being back in Mongolia. What you hear about the country when you are in Germany usually centers around crashing helicopters and incompetent politicians, or family problems. But when you are there, you see that life goes on, that the centre of Ulaanbaatar is actually experiencing a construction boom, that the power and cell phone networks are being expanded in the countryside. Or maybe it was just the feeling that Mongolia is still Mongolia, that the sky is still blue. Or it was the sight of those admirable Mongolian women that made me so euphoric. In any case, the chaos at the Mongolian border checkpoint, the train journey to UB, even the guy with the golden tooth at UB station who tried to make one of the telephone ladies cheat on me (in Mongolian) and then asked me to take his taxi (in English), they all kind of warmed my heart. Also, it was cool to understand at least some of what was being said around me.

Ever since my first trip to Mongolia in 2002, I have been a big fan of riding the furgon. I think the moment that got me in was when the driver just left the paved road to Kharkhorin. He simply turned right and then followed a dirt track, but seemingly without lowering speed. I guess the fascination wears off quickly when you have to use one outside of your vacation, but so far this has not happened to me. I never could really sleep on that 16-20 hour, 685 km rides to Mörön, but I still love it.

The furgon I took this time had the usual 15-odd passengers on board, plus two drivers. I sat in the back, but I know from experience that sitting in the backward-looking row behind the driver is not much of a problem to me either. The passengers were mostly regular people, one drunk with a small daughter, one drunk without, a woman from Buryatia with an about 13-year old daughter. Before departure, some friends of the single drunk passed vodka around in the removed lens of the interior light (they put the lens back afterwards). On the way, the drunk with daughter kept on telling that the very small woman next to me was Öndör Gongor's daughter, that the Buryat woman was his Dondogdulam, that I was his friend etc. The other drunk was a bit of a troublemaker, but fortunately sat far enough from me to not cause me any problems. During the night, however, he did bother the Buryat woman a bit, and then got into a small quarrel with the other drunk. I couldn't help admiring the two girls, how the Buryat girl always cared for her mother, and the other girl kept her father from fighting with the other drunk. The Buryat girl was utterly excited when we drove through the Khanuin gol the next morning, some 150 km before Mörön.

In Rashaant, about 90 km from our destination, the driver would pick up two more passengers with very cute, roughly three-ear old, red-cheeked twin daughters, plus some more baggage. By now, Mörön was only two and a half hours or so away, and after we had crossed the Selenge river about an hour later, people began distributing sweets and samar. A last short stop was caused by one of the girls from Rashaant getting sick from the samar, and then we already crossed the last small pass before Mörön, shortly thereafter passed the marker for the sum border, a big plastic deer with an ovoo, and then rode into town. I was tired and shaken after the bumpy ride, but convinced once more that the furgon leg is the best part of travelling to Mörön on the cheap.

Love parade 2008 in Ulaanbaatar

They are certainly working on it. If you wait to the end of the video, you even see crowds. The video does not really give a date (assuming the (c) 2004 is for the music), but judging from the lack of traffic, it might have been one of the car-free days this summer.