Mongolic languages
The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in North Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongol residents of Inner Mongolia, with an estimated 5.7+ million speakers.
History
The possible precursor to Mongolic is the Xianbei language, heavily influenced by the Proto-Turkic language.The stages of historical Mongolic are:
- Pre-Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 4th century AD until the 12th century AD, influenced by Shaz-Turkic.
- Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 13th century, spoken around the time of Chinggis Khan.
- Middle Mongol, from the 13th century until the early 15th century or late 16th century, depending on classification spoken. Again influenced by Turkic.
- Classical Mongolian, from approximately 1700 to 1900.
- Standard Mongolian The standard Mongolian language has been in official use since 1919, and this form of the language is used in the economic, political, and social fields.
Pre-Proto-Mongolic
Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic refers to the Mongolic spoken a few centuries before Proto-Mongolic by the Mongols and neighboring tribes like the Merkits and Keraits. Certain archaic words and features in Written Mongolian go back past Proto-Mongolic to Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic.
Relationship with Turkic
Pre-Proto-Mongolic has borrowed various words from Turkic languages.In the case of Early Pre-Proto-Mongolic, certain loanwords in the Mongolic languages point to early contact with Oghur Turkic, also known as r-Turkic. These loanwords precede Common Turkic loanwords and include:
- Mongolic ikere from Pre-Proto-Bulgaric ikir
- Mongolic hüker from Pre-Proto-Bulgaric hekür
- Mongolic jer from Pre-Proto-Bulgaric jer
- Mongolic biragu versus Common Turkic buzagu
- Mongolic siri- versus Common Turkic siz-
Later Turkic peoples in Mongolia all spoke forms of Common Turkic as opposed to Oghur Turkic, which withdrew to the west in the 4th century. The Chuvash language, spoken by 1 million people in European Russia, is the only living representative of Oghur Turkic which split from Proto Turkic around the 1st century AD.
Words in Mongolic like dayir and nidurga with initial *d and *n versus Common Turkic *y are sufficiently archaic to indicate loans from an earlier stage of Oghur. This is because Chuvash and Common Turkic do not differ in these features despite differing fundamentally in rhotacism-lambdacism. Oghur tribes lived in the Mongolian borderlands before the 5th century, and provided Oghur loanwords to Early Pre-Proto-Mongolic before Common Turkic loanwords.
Proto-Mongolic
Proto-Mongolic, the ancestor language of the modern Mongolic languages, is very close to Middle Mongol, the language spoken at the time of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Most features of modern Mongolic languages can thus be reconstructed from Middle Mongol. An exception would be the voice suffix like -caga- 'do together', which can be reconstructed from the modern languages but is not attested in Middle Mongol.The languages of the historical Donghu, Wuhuan, and Xianbei peoples might have been related to Proto-Mongolic. For Tabghach, the language of the founders of the Northern Wei dynasty, for which the surviving evidence is very sparse, and Khitan, for which evidence exists that is written in the two Khitan scripts which have as yet not been fully deciphered, a direct affiliation to Mongolic can now be taken to be most likely or even demonstrated.
Middle Mongol
The changes from Proto-Mongolic to Middle Mongol are described below.Changes in phonology
Consonants
Research into reconstruction of the consonants of Middle Mongol has engendered several controversies. Middle Mongol had two series of plosives, but there is disagreement as to which phonological dimension they lie on, whether aspiration or voicing. The early scripts have distinct letters for velar plosives and uvular plosives, but as these are in complementary distribution according to vowel harmony class, only two back plosive phonemes, */k/, *' are to be reconstructed. One prominent, long-running disagreement concerns certain correspondences of word medial consonants among the four major scripts. Word-medial /k/ of Uyghur Mongolian has not one, but two correspondences with the three other scripts: either /k/ or zero. Traditional scholarship has reconstructed */k/ for both correspondences, arguing that */k/ was lost in some instances, which raises the question of what the conditioning factors of those instances were. More recently, the other possibility has been assumed; namely, that the correspondence between UM /k/ and zero in the other scripts points to a distinct phoneme, /h/, which would correspond to the word-initial phoneme /h/ that is present in those other scripts. /h/ is sometimes assumed to derive from *', which would also explain zero in SM, AM, Ph in some instances where UM indicates /p/; e.g. debel > Khalkha deel.The palatal affricates *č, *čʰ were fronted in Northern Modern Mongolian dialects such as Khalkha. was spirantized to in Ulaanbaatar Khalkha and the Mongolian dialects south of it, e.g. Preclassical Mongolian kündü, reconstructed as ' 'heavy', became Modern Mongolian . Originally word-final *n turned into /ŋ/; if *' was originally followed by a vowel that later dropped, it remained unchanged, e.g. ' became, but ' became. After i-breaking, became phonemic. Consonants in words containing back vowels that were followed by ' in Proto-Mongolian became palatalized in Modern Mongolian. In some words, word-final ' was dropped with most case forms, but still appears with the ablative, dative and genitive.
Only foreign origin words start with the letter L and none start with the letter R.
Vowels
The standard view is that Proto-Mongolic had '. According to this view, ' and ' were pharyngealized to and, then ' and ' were velarized to and. Thus, the vowel harmony shifted from a velar to a pharyngeal paradigm. ' in the first syllable of back-vocalic words was assimilated to the following vowel; in word-initial position it became. ' was rounded to when followed by '. VhV and VjV sequences where the second vowel was any vowel but ' were monophthongized. In noninitial syllables, short vowels were deleted from the phonetic representation of the word and long vowels became short; e.g. ' > ' > /jama/ 'goat', and ' > ' > ' > /oms-/ 'to wear'This reconstruction has recently been opposed, arguing that vowel developments across the Mongolic languages can be more economically explained starting from basically the same vowel system as Khalkha, only with instead of *. Moreover, the sound changes involved in this alternative scenario are more likely from an articulatory point of view and early Middle Mongol loans into Korean.
Changes in morphology
Nominal system
"-shaped bracket, and to the right of each such bracket, there are other medium-sized characters|The Secret History of the Mongols which goes back to a lost Mongolian script original is the only document that allows the reconstruction of agreement in social gender in Middle Mongol.In the ensuing discourse, as noted earlier, the term "Middle Mongol" is employed broadly to encompass texts scripted in either Uighur Mongolian, Chinese, or Arabic.
The case system of Middle Mongol has remained mostly intact down to the present, although important changes occurred with the comitative and the dative and most other case suffixes did undergo slight changes in form, i.e., were shortened. The Middle Mongol comitative -luɣ-a could not be used attributively, but it was replaced by the suffix -taj that originally derived adjectives denoting possession from nouns, e.g. mori-tai 'having a horse' became mor