The Naxi Studies Research of the French Tibetologist Jacques Bacot
This 2014 article by Li Xiaoliang and Yu Suisheng examines the pioneering Naxi-studies work of French scholar Jacques Bacot, based on his two expeditions (1907, 1909) to the Yunnan-Tibet border. It details his 1913 monograph Les Mo-sos -- the first Western book-length treatment of Naxi ethnography, religion, language, and script -- covering its structure, Bacot's roughly 900-word Naxi vocabulary list distinguishing spoken and written forms, his grammatical analysis, his identification of Naxi's Dongba (pictographic) and Geba (syllabic) scripts, and his publication of Dongba scriptures, the Genealogy of the Mu Family Chieftains, and the Lijiang Stone Drum Stele. The authors credit Bacot with founding scientific Naxi studies while cataloguing his shortcomings: incomplete fieldwork, inconsistent phonetic transcription, and translation errors (including a documented mistranslation of a Dongba deity's name as "road," later propagated by Berthold Laufer and only corrected by Joseph Rock).
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