2. An Example Page of the Pentaglot Dictionary

The following image shows one page (page 104) of the 1957 Beijing reprint of the Pentaglot. Each lemma fills one column, and four columns fill one page. Within each column, the languages are arranged in the following order:

1. Manju
2. Tibetan
3. Manju-Tibetan transliteration (denoting Tibetan orthography with Manju characters)
4. Manju-Tibetan transcription (denoting Tibetan actual pronounciation with Manju characters)
5. Mongolian
6. Uighur
7. Manju-Uighur transcription (denoting Uighur actual pronounciation with Manju characters)
8. Chinese

You can use your pointing device (mouse, etc.) to point to different areas of the image; the status line of your browser (the small text line at the bottom of your browser window) will potentially show you then additional information, including a romanization of the text under the pointer (Unfortunately, this works better in Netscape than in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I could not try other browsers). The English meaning is given with the Manju entry (top of each column).

This page shows the following noteworthy details:

• Sometimes neighbouring lemmata form clusters of very similar meanings.
• Mongolian is here, as in frequent other instances, accompanied by a reference to a synonym; proposing synonyms for the same lemma is mainly done in Mongolian, sometimes in Tibetan.
• The comma delimiter of the Mongolian word in the third column is missing, an indication of certain shortcomings during the editing process.