Manshu/Outstanding Work

For the convenience of others here are listed any potentially useful tangents for further research that came to mind during my interpretation of the text.


 * Historical comparative phonetic analysis Many names of places, regions, people or objects transliterated in to Chinese could be evaluated on the basis of major linguistic groups in the region against reconstructed period pronunciation in order to obtain further insight in to identities or probable/possible semantics/etymologies.
 * Attribution of origin for each piece of the text Apparently this edition of the text was compiled from fragmentary surviving portions. Finding out precisely where each portion came from would assist with a more fine-grained evaluation of some of the text's contents.
 * Evaluation of prior and subsequent usage of toponyms An evaluation of the prior and subsequent use (or otherwise) of certain geographic names in the text, notably those about the region such as those used for foreign kingdoms of Southeast Asia may assist with more carefully evaluating the text. Certain portions, for example, are extremely detailed in a geographic sense whereas others are almost ridiculously vague. This suggests that some information may have been sourced from other, earlier or contemporary texts. Geographic information was certainly compiled from sources of vastly differing quality.