[4.1]
[duwa suqur manglai dumda ghaghca nidütü]
[dumda] is used here as a postposition, although it is more common to find it used in the role of noun or adjective as in dumda ulus ‘The Middle People’ i.e. China, which is a literal translation of the Chinese zhongguo.
[ghaghca nidütü] here the noun nidün ‘eye’ is qualified by the nominal suffix -tu/tü which indicates possession. It is not to be confused with the genitive case, but rather is used in the derivation of words. When translating these constructions into English we are usually left with an independent noun, e.g. moritu (derived from morin ‘horse’) gives us ‘horseman’ or ‘knight’ cf. French ‘chevalier’ however the literal meaning of this constructing is ‘horse-having’ or ‘one who posses a horse’. So in some cases it is necessary to add the qualifier ‘having’ to the English translation; therefore nidütü means ‘one who has eyes’ and [ghaghca nidütü] means ‘having only one eye’.
[ghurban negürid ghajar-a qaraqu bülüge]
negürid is the plural form of negüri. Plurals are not as important in Mongolian as they are in Indo-European and Semitic languages. This is a shared characteristic of the languages associated with the Altaic Hypothesis (i.e. Korean, Japanese, Turkish) and Chinese. As with Turkish, the presence of a numeral or quantity word eliminates the need for a plural, but Mongolian uses plurals far less than Turkish, and usually only as a last resort in order to avoid ambiguity. negüri refers to a nomad camp when stationary. A negüri therefore is the camp established after a migrating group of nomads have stopped while on a journey.
[ghurban negürid ghajar-a] here ghurban negürid ghajar is marked by the dataive-locative case marker a. The Dative-Locative case is used to express ‘in/at/on/to etc’ Therefore the sense here is ‘to a distance of three camps’
[qaraqu bülüge]
Here the combination of the future verbal noun in -qu + bülüge (was/were) gives a sense of possibility as in ‘could’. Literally qaraqu bülüge is ‘seeing could’
Section Translation:
Although Duwa Suqur only had a single eye, in the middle of his forehead, he could see to a distance of three days’ journey with it.
