The Mongol word kümün "man" mentioned by Corff is, of course, a derivation of the Anglo-Saxon gumman "man" (adapted for vowel harmony).

i love your blog, language hat. it's all so very interesting. sometimes you are too technical for me. my aspiration as a child was to be a linguist, which seemed to be too outlandish to the people around me. it's not their fault, i just gave up, and now, especially when i read your blog, miss it...

so thanks for filling in some of the details! i really love visiting!

Robert Ramsey's book The Languages of China says the people prefer to be called Monguor, which is their version of "Mongol", as -r and -l have become indistinct. You can get more information by googling "Monguor", including my summary of Ramsey on Recycled Knowledge.

In The Languages of China, Ramsey distinguishes the Santa (Dongxiang) from the Monguor, though he places them both with the Gansu-Qinghai group of Mongolian languages. He also states that "the people call themselves 'Santa'" (p. 199). See pp. 199-200 for the Santa and pp. 200-1 for the Monguor. I have some of this in my own entry on the recent articles.

Yeah, Monguor and Santa/Dongxiang are two different groups. Ramsey has nice little sections on each.

kasturi: I see from your blog you translate Danish poetry, so your interest in language has certainly not been wasted!

My bad. Thanks for the corrections, and I shoulda looked it up.

I'm wondering why Hat says Gansu and Wikipedia says Gansu but the link is to Kansu (which Wikipedia automagically redirects to Gansu).

I probably typed "Kansu" into the search box because that's how this grizzled old pre-pinyin type thinks of it. As to why I wound up putting Gansu in my text, it may be because the article used that spelling and I didn't want to confuse people, though god knows I don't usually worry my head about that.