Bosson J.E. Buriat Reader

Indiana University, Bloomington. 1962. — 249 p.
This reader is designed to give the student sufficient experience in reading modern literary Buriat to enable him to go on to read any of the works that are now appearing in the Buriat ASSR. The grammatical explanations are perhaps presented in rather too large batches for good pedagogical style. The tempo of the introduction of new material will probably fit the student who has some previous knowledge of Mongolian, but I hope that the book can also serve comfortably as a primer for a person to whom Buriat will be the first contact with a Mongolian language. For a more complete treatment of the structure of Buriat, Nicholas Poppe’s Buriat Grammar (Uralic and Altaic Seris, volume 2; Bloomington, 1960) should be used as a complement to this reader.
Each of the first fifteen lessons contains a grammatical outline, a reading selection, and notes on the reading selection. In lessons one to ten the reading is given both in cyrillic script and in transliteration. Because of the scarcity of sources, the material in the initial readings is necessarily rather juvenile. The readings in the main body of the work were selected on the basis of their brevity and degree of difficulty, and do not give a fair picture of modern Buriat literature.
The glossary contains all the words encountered in the texts. In some cases, where the addition of a diminutive ending or a verbal suffix such as -sagaa- adds no unexpected meaning to a word, the student must look up the basic form of the word and modify it according to the sense added by the suffix. Verbs are listed in the -xa (-xo, -xe) form. An index of the suffixes and particles discussed-in the-grammatical notes has been added at the end of the book for ease of reference.