The Rules and Nature of the Transliteration of Naxi Vocabulary in Bacot's Les Mo-so
This article decodes the idiosyncratic Romanized transliteration French Tibetologist Jacques Bacot devised for Naxi vocabulary in his 1913 monograph Les Mo-so, long regarded as the founding Western work on Naxi studies but largely unreadable because of Bacot's invented spelling. Working from French phonetic and orthographic conventions and comparing Bacot's roughly 870-word Yezhi list against Fu Maoji's 1940s Weixi Naxi data and modern Lijiang Naxi, the authors establish systematic consonant and vowel correspondences between Bacot's letters and IPA values. They argue Bacot's method combined French orthographic habit with his own phonetic judgment and borrowed transcriptions, contradicting Berthold Laufer's dismissal of it as mere French-alphabet guesswork. The reconstruction recovers the approximate phonological shape of early-20th-century Yezhi Naxi and raises further questions about dialect relationships, especially palatalization and consonant clusters shared with Lijiang and Weixi.
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