Cross-Linguistic Transcription and Phonological Representation in the Hu\`it\'onggu\v{a}nx\`i Hu\'ay\'iy\`iy\v{u} 文章

arXiv:2605.14480v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Purpose: This study investigates the transcription principles underlying Hu\`it\'onggu\v{a}nx\`i Hu\'ay\'iy\`iy\v{u} (HHY), a series of multilingual glossaries compiled by the Ming government between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for interpreter training. The study treats HHY not as a collection of isolated language materials, but as a coherent multilingual transcription system representing spoken forms of non-Chinese languages through Chinese characters. Methods: A substantial portion of HHY was digitized and aligned with Chinese phonological categories. Previous reconstructions of individual language sections were critically reviewed and integrated into a unified comparative database. The analysis focuses on cross-linguistic regularities in Main Transcription (MT) and Supplementary Transcription (ST) across eight language sections.