Brief Biography

Born in Bruges

Bruges

Bruges is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located in the northwest of the country....

, 10 August 1881; studied Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 and Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 during his Secondary education

Secondary education

Secondary education is the stage of education following primary education. Secondary education includes the final stage of compulsory education and in many countries it is entirely compulsory. The next stage of education is usually college or university...

. He joined the CICM Missionaries, and was ordained priest

Priesthood (Catholic Church)

The ministerial orders of the Catholic Church include the orders of bishops, deacons and presbyters, which in Latin is sacerdos. The ordained priesthood and common priesthood are different in function and essence....

. As a seminarian in Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

 he studied Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

, which he came to know well; he also began to learn Mongolian

Mongolian language

The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...

 using Isaac Jacob Schmidt

Isaac Jacob Schmidt

Isaac Jacob Schmidt was an Orientalist specializing in Mongolian and Tibetan. Schmidt was a Moravian missionary to the Kalmyks and devoted much of his labours to bible translation....

’s Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache (St. Petersburg, 1831) and a Mongolian New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

. He served as a missionary

Missionary

A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...

 in the town of Boro Balγasu in the southern Ordos region

Ordos Desert

The Ordos Desert is a desert and steppe region lying on a plateau in the south of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China . The soil of the Ordos is a mixture of clay and sand and, as a result, is poorly suited for agriculture. It extends over an area of...

 from 1906-1925. His early work concentrated on the Ordos dialect

Ordos dialect

The Ordos dialect of Mongolian is spoken in the Ordos City region in Inner Mongolia. It is also sometimes classified as a language within the Mongolic language family or as a dialect of the Southern Mongolian standard language...

, with studies of phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 and the compilation of a dictionary. He also translated Catholic

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

 works from Chinese into Mongolian. The Monguor language formed another field of study. From 1925-1948 he lived in Beijing

Beijing

Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...

, where he devoted himself primarily to scholarship. In 1948 he moved to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, where he lived until his retirement to Belgium in 1965. Died in Tienen, 2 June 1971. His Mongol name was Tiyen Baγsi or Nom-un Baγsi Tiyen, deriving from his Chinese name Tian Qingbo (田清波).

In addition to linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 he worked on ethnography

Ethnography

Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

 and folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

. In 1926 he began work on an analysis of the Secret History of the Mongols. Overall, Mostaert seems to have had the most extensive command of Mongol of any twentieth century Western scholar, derived from his decades living among the Ordos Mongols as a pastor. Nicholas Poppe called him “…the most outstanding scholar in the field of Mongolian studies.” Mostaert was particularly prolific as a consultant aiding other scholars, both Chinese and Western, and his scholarly impact cannot be judged solely from his formal publications. His main disciple was Henry Serruys, who has worked extensively on the history of Mongol-Ming

Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...

 relations.

The private library and papers of A. Mostaert are kept at the Scheut Memorial Library in Leuven

Leuven

Leuven is the capital of the province of Flemish Brabant in the Flemish Region, Belgium...

, Belgium.

Major works

• Textes oraux ordos, recueillis et publiés avec introduction, notes morphologiques, commentaries et glossaire (Pei’ping, H. Vetch, 1937)
• Dictionannaire ordos (Peking, [Furen?] Catholic University, 1941-4)
• Folklore ordos (Peip’ing, Catholic University, 1947)
• Sur quelques passages de l’Histoire Secrète des Mongols, published separately in HJAS, 1950-2, in one volume, 1953

He also worked extensively on the 華夷譯語 Huayi yiyu (the "Chinese-Barbarian Dictionary" of the Bureau of Translators), which like the Secret History took the form of a Mongol text both transcribed and translated into Chinese. This work was never published by him, but appeared posthumously in 1977 edited by Igor de Rachewiltz

Igor de Rachewiltz

Igor de Rachewiltz is an Italian historian and philologist specializing in Mongol studies.Igor de Rachewiltz was born in Rome, the son of Bruno Guido and Antonina Perosio. The de Rachewiltz family was of Polish noble roots. His grandmother was a Tatar from Kazan in eastern Russia who claimed...

as

• Le matériel mongol du Houa i i iu de Houng-ou (1389), Bruxelles, Institut belge des hautes études chinoises 1389.

Sources

• “The Reverend Antoine Mostaert, C.I.C.M.”, Serge Eliséeff, HJAS, v. 19, vii-xiv
• Essays in Antoine Mostaert (1881–1971): C.I.C.M. Missionary and Scholar, ed. Klaus Sagaster, 1999.