Mongolian place names in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação

Abstract

The Mongolic term khaan (‘king’), for which there is full correspondence, semantic and phonological, in sixteenth century Portuguese cão, is used as a starting-point to identify the graphemes that correspond to several Mongolic consonants in place names transcribed in the chapters related to the Tartars in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação (1614). With the deduced rules of pronunciation at hand, it is possible to establish new pairs of lexical correspondences and solve a brief lexicon extracted from the list of Tartar toponyms.