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from Part 1 - History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2019
The founders of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534) were the Tuoba, a branch of the Inner Asian Xianbei (*Särbi) people, who spoke an Altaic language, probably an early form of Mongolian. Unfortunately there are no surviving texts in their native tongue, only scattered transcriptions of a few of their words and names into Chinese, in texts including the traditional history of Northern Wei, the sixth-century Weishu. One of these names was “Tuoba” itself, the modern Mandarin pronunciation of a contemporary Chinese transcription of an Altaic name rendered alphabetically as “Tabgač” on the eighth-century Turkic Orkhon inscriptions. It will be well for the reader to remember that, particularly in early Wei, quotations in Weishu are frequently Chinese translations of remembered statements made originally in the Tabgač tongue.
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