Middle Mongol

Middle Mongol or Middle Mongolian was a Mongolic koiné language spoken in the Mongol Empire. Originating from Genghis Khan's home region of Northeastern Mongolia, it diversified into several Mongolic languages after the collapse of the empire. In comparison to Modern Mongolian, it is known to have had no long vowels, different vowel harmony and verbal systems and a slightly different case system.

Definition and historical predecessors

Middle Mongolian closely resembles Proto-Mongolic, the reconstructed last common ancestor of the modern Mongolic languages, which dates it to shortly after the time when Genghis Khan united a number of tribes under his command and formed the Khamag Mongol.
The term "Middle Mongol" or "Middle Mongolian" is somewhat misleading, since it is the earliest directly-attested ancestor of Modern Mongolian, and would therefore be termed "Old Mongolian" under the usual conventions for naming historical forms of languages. Although the existence of an earlier Mongol clan federation in Mongolia during the 12th century is historical, there is no surviving language material from that period.
According to Vovin, the Rouran language of the Rouran Khaganate was a Mongolic language and close, but not identical, to Middle Mongolian.
Juha Janhunen classified the Khitan language into the "Para-Mongolic" family, meaning it is related to the Mongolic languages as a sister group, rather than as a direct descendant of Proto-Mongolic. Alexander Vovin has also identified several possible loanwords from Koreanic languages into Khitan. He also identified the extinct Tuyuhun language as another Para-Mongolic language.

Corpus

The temporal delimitation of Middle Mongol causes some problems as shown in definitions ranging from the 13th until the early 15th or until the late 16th century. This discrepancy arises from the lack of documents written in the Mongolian language from between the early 15th and late 16th centuries. It is not clear whether these two delimitations constitute conscious decisions about the classification of e.g. a small text from 1453 with less than 120 words or whether the vaster definition is just intended to fill up the time gap for which little proper evidence is available.
File:SecretHistoryMongols1908.jpg|thumb|Initial pages of the Secret History of the Mongols published in 1908 by Ye Dehui. The rows with large characters represent Mongolian phonetic transcription in Chinese characters, with the right-hand smaller characters representing the glosses
File:八思巴文鐡牌-Safe Conduct Pass with Inscription in Phakpa Script MET DT7052.jpg|thumb|Yuan era paiza with Middle Mongol inscriptions in Phags-pa script
File:سکه ارغون خان.jpg|thumb|Gold dinar of the Mongol ilkhan of Persia, Arghun with Middle Mongol legends in Uighur script
Middle Mongol survived in a number of scripts, namely notably ʼPhags-pa, Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian script and a few western scripts. Usually, the Stele of Yisüngge is considered to be its first surviving monument. It is a sports report written in Mongolian writing that was already fairly conventionalized then and most often dated between 1224 and 1225. However, Igor de Rachewiltz argues that it is unlikely that the stele was erected at the place where it was found in the year of the event it describes, suggesting that it is more likely to have been erected about a quarter of a century later, when Yisüngge had gained more substantial political power. If so, the earliest surviving Mongolian monument would be an edict of Töregene Khatun of 1240 and the oldest surviving text arguably The Secret History of the Mongols, a document that must originally have been written in Mongolian script in 1252, but which only survives in an edited version as a textbook for learning Mongolian from the Ming dynasty, thus reflecting the pronunciation of Middle Mongol from the second half of the 14th century.
The term "Middle Mongol" is problematic insofar as there is no body of texts that is commonly called "Old Mongol". While a revision of this terminology for the early period of Mongolian has been attempted, the lack of a thorough and linguistically-based periodization of Mongolian up to now has constituted a problem for any such attempts. The related term "Preclassical Mongolian" is applied to Middle Mongol documents in Mongolian script, since these show some distinct linguistic peculiarities.

Phonology

Middle Mongol had the consonant phonemes and the vowel phonemes. The main difference to older approaches is that is identified with and , so that for Proto-Mongolic cannot be reconstructed from internal evidence that used to be based solely on word-initial and the then rather incomplete data from Monguor.

	Front	Neutral	Back
High
Mid
Low

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular
Nasal
Fortis					-
Lenis
Fricative
Lateral
Liquid
Semivowel

There appears to have been a positionally determined allophonic variation,, with the postvelar allophones occurring in back-vowel contexts. Both have been claimed to occur before , which would make them phonemic.
In transliteration, and are commonly indicated as and, respectively;, and are written , and ; is denoted by ; is spelt ; and may be expressed by .

Morphophonology

The vowels participate in front-back vowel harmony, where /a/, /o/ and /u/ alternate with /e/, /ø/ and /y/; in the rest of this article, morphemes are represented only by their back-vocalic allomorph. The vowel /i/ is neutral with respect to vowel harmony. Certain stems end in an 'unstable /n/', which is obligatorily or optionally dropped in front of various suffixes. The consonants /g/ and /k/ are elided in front of vowel-initial suffixes.

Grammar

Middle Mongol is an agglutinating language that makes nearly exclusive use of suffixes. The word order is subject–object–predicate if the subject is a noun and also object–predicate–subject if it is a pronoun. Middle Mongol rather freely allows for predicate–object, which is due to language contact. There are nine cases, the nominative being unmarked. The verbal suffixes can be divided into finite suffixes, participles and converbal suffixes. Some of the finite suffixes inflect for subject number and gender. Adjectives precede their modificatum and agree with it in number. The pronouns have a clusivity distinction.

Nominal morphology

Number

The plural suffixes are distributed as follows:

Suffix	Used with	Note
-nar	vowel stems denoting non-lineal kinship terms and deities	only in texts of eastern provenance
-nu'ud	unclear	only in texts of eastern provenance
-s	vowel stems
-d	stems in -n, -l, -r	The stem-final consonant is elided; likewise the entire stem-final sequence -sun in earlier texts.
-ud	other consonant stems
-n	stems in a vowel + -y	The stem-final -y is elided.

Case endings and the reflexive suffix

The case endings have different allomorphs depending on whether the stem ends in a vowel, the consonant /n/ or another consonant. There is also some chronological variation between earlier and later texts, as marked with the sign > in the table.

	vowel stems	consonant stems	n-stems
genitive	-yin, -n	-un, -in, -ai	-u
accusative	-yi	-i	-i
dative-locative	-Du, -Da	-a	-a
ablative	-ca > -sa	-ca > -sa	-ca > -asa
instrumental	-'ar	-i'ar > -aar	-i'ar
comitative	-lu'a > -laa

The dative-locative may denote not only an indirect object, but also local and temporal expressions, both static and dynamic. The accusative ending may be replaced by the unmarked nominative, especially if the noun is not definite and specific; in such cases, stems ending in unstable /n/ lose it. The comitative may also be used as an instrumental. The ablative expresses the object of a comparison in a construction expressing the comparative degree: qola-ca qola 'farther than far', lit. 'far from far'. The genitive does the same in the superlative degree construction: irgen-ü sayin haran 'the best of the people', lit. 'people good of people'.
A reflexive possessive suffix can be placed after a noun declined for any case. Its shape varies depending on phonological factors and the genitive ending of vowel stems is also changed in front of it:

	after vowels	after consonants
basic form	-'an	-i'an
genitive	-yu-'an > -yaan	-u-'an > -aan

Pronouns

The personal pronouns exhibit an inclusive-exclusive distinction. They mostly take the same case suffixes as the nouns, but display some suppletion and stem allomorphy, as summarised below:
Other pronouns and related forms are:

	nom.sg.	oblique	plural	plural oblique	place	manner	kind	quantity	time
proximal demonstrative	ene	e'ün-	ede	eden-	ende	eyin	eyimü	edüi
distal demonstrative	tere	teün-	tede	teden-	tende	teyin	teyimü	tedüi
'same'	mün	mün	müt
interrogative who?	ken	ken-	ked			ker		kedüi	keji'e,keli
interrogative what?	ya'un > yaan	ya'un > yaan	ya'ud		qa'a	yekin	yambar
reflexive	ö'er	ö'er-	ö'ed

Indefinite pronouns are formed by combining the interrogatives and the particle -ba.