Why is Chinese not the official language of the Yuan Dynasty? July 1, 1251: Meng Ge becomes the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. In the Chinese society of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols were conquerors and rulers.

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Why is Chinese not the official language of Yuan Dynasty ? July 1, 1251: Meng Ge became the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire.

Everyone needs to understand a concept.

Standing in the Chinese society of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols were conquerors and rulers.

After more than 40 years of war, the Mongols used force to destroy the Southern Song Dynasty.

For the Mongols, this was just a naked violent conquest.

The Mongols are the rulers, and the Hans, Jurchens, and Khitans are the ruled, and there is a distinction between superiority and inferiority.

The Mongols established four major khanates in the world at that time, namely Ogedai Khanate, Chagatai Khanate, Ilkhanate, and the Golden Horde.

In addition to these four khanates, there was also the Yuan Dynasty.

The territory of the Yuan Dynasty was very large, roughly covering today's China and Outer Mongolia , as well as the Far East of Russia and parts of Siberia , but it did not include most of Xinjiang.

The Yuan Dynasty was the era when the Mongols conquered the Central Plains. It was a foreign nation that defeated the Han government through force and established alien rule.

Some Western historians call the Yuan Dynasty the Tuolei Khanate, which was the khanate established by the direct descendants of Tourei. Essentially, the Tolei Khanate was no different from the other four khanates.

The Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty were the conquerors and the ruling class. The Han, Jurchens, Khitans, Tibetans and other ethnic groups were all ruled civilians.

Therefore, the official text of the Yuan Dynasty is of course not Chinese, or Jurchen , Khitan , but Mongolian .

In the Yuan Dynasty, Mongolian was also divided into two types.

Before the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols were nomadic and barbaric people with a very shallow cultural foundation and no written language of their own.

Mongolians only have some spoken languages, and there are certain differences between different tribes, making it difficult to communicate with each other.

Since there is no written language, the Mongolians lack cultural carriers and written communication tools, which is extremely disadvantageous.

After Genghis Khan gradually increased its strength, it realized the importance of text.

One of the key points why Genghis Khan was able to win consecutive battles was that he had a high-efficiency and high-speed command transmission mechanism.

He has extremely fast messengers on horseback, but there is a huge problem, that is, there are no words.

relies on messengers to convey orders verbally. If there is a slight memory error, the consequences will be disastrous.

Therefore, Genghis Khan was very interesting in compiling the orders into songs, letting the messengers practice them repeatedly, and then spread them. Because the ballads were rhythmic, the concept of errors was low, ensuring that Genghis Khan's orders could be conveyed accurately.

This is not the solution after all. We still need to have Mongolian characters.

Around 1204, after Genghis Khan defeated the Naiman people, he captured a man named Tata Tonga.

Tata Tonga is a Uyghur person and is proficient in Uyghur writing. At that time, the Naiman tribe lived together with the Uyghurs in the western part of the Mongolian grassland, and many tribes also used the Uyghur script.

And Tata Tong'a is the master of NaimanGreat KhanSun Khan. He is responsible for recording the tribe's accounts in Uyghur characters and managing the gold seal.

At that time, almost all Uyghur scholars were responsible for the tribe’s accounts and work that required the use of writing.

After capturing Tata Tonga, Genghis Khan believed that the Naiman approach was quite advisable and let the Uyghur scholar serve him.

It’s just that Genghis Khan had a larger pattern and directly ordered Tata Tonga to create the Mongolian’s own writing.

This requirement is not difficult for Tata Tonga, who has learned a lot.

He created Mongolian based on the ancient Uyghur alphabet (ancient Uighur alphabet) with slight changes.

This is also the first writing in Mongolian history and is called ancient Mongolian.

For a long time after the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, the official text was this Uighur (ancient Uyghur) Mongolian script. The Mongolian script

has been passed down to this day, which is the Mongolian script used in Inner Mongolia today (it later evolved several times).

After the Mongols defeated the Jin Kingdom and occupied northern China, they used this Mongolian script as their official script.

However, changes occurred after the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty.

After Kublai Khan became the Great Khan, he controlled a very large territory and ruled many ethnic groups.

Mongolian writing has just been created not long ago, and it is an immature pinyin language.

Only Mongolians who can speak Mongolian to begin with can learn this script relatively easily. Other ethnic groups cannot speak Mongolian, so learning is difficult.

In addition to being difficult to learn, there are also problems with the use of Mongolian.

The Mongolian script at this time had not been created for a long time and was far less mature than Chinese characters and Uyghur script.

Because of the lack of many words, Mongolian often cannot accurately express some meanings, that is, the words do not convey the meaning.

It is a script that is difficult to learn and use, and it is a new script that has just been created. Naturally, other ethnic groups are reluctant to use Mongolian.

Kublai Khan believed that a new text must be created as the new official language of the Yuan Dynasty.

Under the order of Kublai Khan, the Mongolian National Preceptor Pasiba spent 8 years creating a new Mongolian script based on Tubo text, called Pasiba .

In 1269, Kublai Khan issued an edict to promulgate the Phasiba script throughout the country and became the official Mongolian script of the Yuan Dynasty.

Unfortunately, Phasiba script is even worse than ancient Mongolian script.

Pasiba script is a kind of pinyin, which includes most of the spoken languages ​​of Mongolian, Tibetan, Uighur and Chinese in the form of text.

There are big differences between these four languages, especially Chinese is not a pinyin language at all. The same word in Chinese may have completely different meanings in different parts of the world. Because it has to take into account other languages, Pasiba does not have tones similar to today's Chinese Pinyin.

uses this written method to record text, which is basically unrecognizable.

Everyone knows that Chinese characters have a large number of homophones, such as cage and deaf, lion and louse, Mianyang and sheep, homework and conquer, cooking oil and petroleum, etc. The Phasiba language simply ignores the recognition of this homophonic Chinese character, and ordinary Han Confucian students simply cannot spell it out.

Not only that, Phasiba script, like ancient Mongolian script, is written from left to right and from top to bottom, while Tibetan script is written horizontally, and Tibetans are also quite disgusted with this kind of writing.

From this point of view, Pasi Bawen was almost doomed to fail when it was born.

Pasiba script originally only had 41 letters, but it was found that it could not cover all spoken sounds.

As a result, the letters of Phasiba script were increased to 57 letters.

Do you know what the 57 letters are? English, which everyone is struggling to learn, only has 26 letters.

After the birth of Pasiba script, because it was too complicated, even Mongolians did not learn it and still used simple ancient Mongolian script. Two years after the promotion of

, few people in the country have mastered Pasiba script.

Seeing that this was not going to work, Kublai Khan introduced many policies to promote the promotion of writing: It was Kublai Khan who issued an edict in 1271 requiring all officials to learn the Pasiba script within a hundred days. If the junior officials learn it, they can be promoted, and those who have no official position can learn it. For officials, those who were illiterate could be exempted from the Ula corvee for life if they learned how to read.

Even so, it is very difficult to forcefully promote Phasi Bawen, and it has little meaning. Text is a tool and an important medium used by ordinary people every day. It must be convenient and practical to become popular.

Until the demise of the Yuan Dynasty, there were almost no people who truly mastered the Pasiba script.

Having said that, Pasiba script is, after all, the only official text of the Yuan Dynasty.

There are still a very small number of Mongolian, Semu and Han officials who will learn Pasiba script and use it as a unified translation manuscript.

The emperor's Mongolian imperial edicts were all written in Phasiba script. What is interesting is that nobles and vassal kings from various places refused to use this script for their subordinates.

The government announcements issued by some Mongolian kings to the people are very interesting. In the entire announcement, only the large characters of the title are in Pasiba script, which is intended to explain Kublai Khan's orders. All the small characters in it are in ancient Mongolian.

After the demise of the Yuan Dynasty, Pasiba script became a disappearing script in the Central Plains, and no one used it anymore.

In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the Northern Yuan Dynasty, which existed in name only, collapsed. The Mongols on the plateau also completely abolished the Phasiba script and reused the ancient Mongolian script. In Inner Mongolia and Outer Mongolia today, the Phasiba script is almost extinct. Only some ancient Mongolian buildings have some Phaspa inscriptions on the doors and windows. But the owner didn't know that these were Phaspa scripts. He only knew that they were some beautiful symbols.

Because no one uses Pashba script anymore, it has become a dead language like ancient Hebrew .

Today at least a few scholars are learning Phasiba script under the national plan to ensure that this language will not be completely lost.

In the 17th century, Mongolian writing was improved again. Due to the study of Buddhist scriptures, a large number of Tibetan and Sanskrit vocabulary were incorporated.

In fact, we don’t need to randomly identify our ancestors. The Mongolians of the Yuan Dynasty are not the ancestors of our Han people, but the ancestors of the Mongolian people in China. This can be seen from the fact that they would rather use two imperfect scripts than use the most mature Chinese language in East Asia as the official script.

In addition, what China's Mongolian masters is the real Mongolian text. Although the spoken Mongolian language in Outer Mongolia is not much different from that in Inner Mongolia, the written language is vastly different. After the Soviet Union occupied Outer Mongolia, it implemented an assimilation policy and quickly abolished the Mongolian script and switched to the Russian alphabet (i.e. Cyrillic alphabet) Mongolian characters.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union , Outer Mongolia tried many times to restore the ancient Mongolian script, but the results were very poor.

After all, the text gap has lasted for nearly a hundred years, involving several generations and all aspects of social life. It is not that easy to recover.

On March 18, 2020, the Mongolian government officially adopted the "National Outline of Mongolian Script" and decided to fully resume the use of traditional Mongolian script from 2025.

Mongolian literature scholars believe that it is very difficult or even impossible to achieve this goal.

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