A Study of N. N. Poppe’s Russian Annotation of Mongol’skiy Slovar’ Muqaddimat al-Adab: Its Function as a Meta-Language and Its Cognitive-Comparative Linguistic Significance

This study examines the linguistic characteristics and academic significance of the Russian-annotated version of Muqaddimat al-Adab, compiled by the Soviet linguist and ethnographer Nikolai Poppe (1938). Muqaddimat al-Adab is a multilingual lexicon encompassing Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Mongolian, and serves as a key source for understanding the linguistic and cultural exchanges of medieval Central Asia. Poppe’s Russian annotations go beyond simple translation, demonstrating how Russian functioned as an analytical and comparative linguistic framework in describing non-Slavic languages. As the first study of its kind in Korea, this research investigates how Russian operates as both an analytical language and a meta-language for interpreting the morphosyntactic and semantic systems of Altaic languages. Poppe’s commentary reveals how Russian grammatical devices—particularly aspect, causativity, reflexive and reciprocal constructions—replace the agglutinative morphology of the source languages with syntactic structures that allow for semantic precision and hierarchical organization of events. By situating Russian not merely as a medium of translation but as a methodological tool of linguistic analysis, this paper demonstrates the adaptability of Russian grammatical frameworks for cross-linguistic description. The findings establish Muqaddimat al-Adab as a foundational text for understanding the functional transformation of Russian within comparative linguistics. Furthermore, this research provides a cornerstone for future studies on semantic expansion, grammatical structures, and historical lexicography, while contributing to the broader integration of Russian, Central Asian, and digital philological scholarship.