Names of musical instruments in the Monument “Truthful Record about the Mongols of the Qing Empire”

The author considers the names of musical instruments presented in the decree on attributes of an escort of the Manchurian governor Hung Taiji for the festive ceremony held in honor of granting him the title ‘Gracious Peaceful Bogdo-Khan’ in 1636. The decree is presented in the written monument “Truthful record about Mongols of the Qing Empire” published in Classic Mongolian in 2013 in Huhe-Hoto (Inner Mongolia, People’s Republic of China). The author concludes that nominations of most of musical instruments took place on the basis of the acoustic perception of the sound they produced. For the first time the etymology of the word bičkigür ‘flute’ from the now-defunct verb *bičgi- ‘to whistle’ is proposed. In this way, in the Mongolic languages there are both ‘transparent onomatopoeias’ associated with some real sounds and imitations that lost their connection with the ideophonic words and allow only etymological reconstructions. The analyzing of semantics of dependent components of Mongolian complex words indicates that figurative perception of objects plays the main role during the nomination process. Consideration of complex words shows a generally similar mechanism of nomination of musical instruments in Mongolian and Chinese of the 17 th century. The description of the ideophonic words made it possible to expose semiotic, psychophysiological and linguistic foundations of the essence of language.