Mongolian language
Encyclopedia
The Mongolian language (in Mongolian script
:
, ; in Mongolian Cyrillic
: ) 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 Mongolia
autonomous region of China. In Mongolia, the Khalkha dialect
, written in Cyrillic, is predominant, while in Inner Mongolia, the language is more dialect
ally diverse and is written in the traditional Mongolian script
. In the discussion of grammar to follow, the variety of Mongolian treated is Standard Khalkha Mongolian (i.e., the standard written language as formalized in the writing conventions and in the school grammar), but much of what is to be said is also valid for vernacular (spoken) Khalkha and other Mongolian dialects, especially Chakhar.
Mongolian has vowel harmony
and a complex syllabic structure for a Mongolic language that allows clusters of up to three consonants syllable-finally. It is a typical agglutinative language
that relies on suffix chains in the verbal and nominal domains. While there is a basic word order, subject–object–predicate, ordering among noun phrase
s is relatively free, so grammatical roles are indicated by a system of about eight grammatical case
s. There are five voices. Verbs are marked for voice, aspect
, tense
, and epistemic modality
/evidentiality
. In sentence linking, a special role is played by converbs.
Modern Mongolian evolved from "Middle Mongolian", the language spoken in the Mongol Empire
of the 13th and 14th centuries. In the transition, a major shift in the vowel harmony paradigm occurred, long vowels
developed, the case system was slightly reformed, and the verbal system was restructured.
, where it is spoken by about 2.7 million people, and an official language of China's Inner Mongolia
region, where it is spoken by 2.7 million or more people. The exact number of Mongolian speakers in China is hard to determine, as there is no data available on Chinese citizens' language proficiency. There are roughly five million ethnic Mongolians in China, but the use of Mongolian is in decline among them, especially among younger speakers in urban areas, due to the dominance of Mandarin Chinese. The great majority of speakers of Mongolian proper in China live in Inner Mongolia; in addition, some speakers of the Kharchin and Khorchin dialect
s live in areas of Liaoning
, Jilin
, and Heilongjiang
that border Inner Mongolia. According to Uradyn E. Bulag, anthropologist at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
, New York
, USA, Mongols are displaying significant linguistic anxiety about losing their language and linguistic identity to powerful Chinese nationalistic and cultural forces.
Mongolian belongs to the Mongolic languages
. The delimitation of the Mongolian language within Mongolic is a much disputed theoretical problem, one whose resolution is impeded by the fact that existing data for the major varieties
is not easily arrangeable according to a common set of linguistic criteria. Such data might account for the historical
development of the Mongolian dialect continuum
, as well as for its sociolinguistic
qualities. Though phonological and lexical studies are comparatively well developed, the basis has yet to be laid for a comparative morphosyntactic
study, for example between such highly diverse varieties as Khalkha
and Khorchin.
The status of certain varieties in the Mongolic group—whether they are languages distinct from Mongolian or just dialects of it—is disputed. There are at least three such varieties: Oirat
(including the Kalmyk variety
) and Buryat
, both of which are spoken in Russia, Mongolia, and China; and Ordos
, spoken around Inner Mongolia's Ordos City
.
There is no disagreement that the Khalkha dialect of the Mongolian state is Mongolian. Beyond this one point, however, agreement ends. For example, the influential classification of Sanžeev (1953) proposed a "Mongolian language" consisting of just the three dialects Khalkha, Chakhar
, and Ordos, with Buryat and Oirat judged to be independent languages. On the other hand, Luvsanvandan (1959) proposed a much broader "Mongolian language" consisting of a Central dialect (Khalkha, Chakhar, Ordos), an Eastern dialect (Kharchin, Khorchin), a Western dialect (Oirat, Kalmyk), and a Northern dialect (consisting of two Buryat varieties). Some Western scholars propose that the relatively well researched Ordos variety is an independent language due to its conservative syllable structure and phoneme
inventory. While the placement of a variety like Alasha
, which is under the cultural influence of Inner Mongolia but historically tied to Oirat, and of other border varieties like Darkhad would very likely remain problematic in any classification, the central problem remains the question of how to classify Chakhar, Khalkha, and Khorchin in relation to each other and in relation to Buryat and Oirat . The split of [tʃ] into [tʃ] before *i and [ts] before all other reconstructed vowels, which is found in Mongolia but not in Inner Mongolia, is often cited as a fundamental distinction, for example Proto-Mongolic *tʃil, Khalkha /tʃiɮ/, Chakhar /tʃil/ 'year' versus Proto-Mongolic *tʃøhelen, Khalkha /tsooɮəŋ/, Chakhar /tʃooləŋ/ 'few'. On the other hand, the split between the past tense verbal suffixes -sŋ in the Central varieties vs. -dʒɛː in the Eastern varieties is usually seen as a merely stochastic
difference.
In Inner Mongolia, official language policy divides the Mongolian language into three dialects: Southern Mongolian, Oirat, and Barghu-Buryat. Southern Mongolian is said to consist of Chakhar, Ordos, Baarin
, Khorchin, Kharchin, and Alasha. The authorities have synthesized a literary standard
for Mongolian in China whose grammar is said to be based on Southern Mongolian and whose pronunciation is based on the Chakhar dialect as spoken in the Plain Blue Banner
. Dialectologically, however, western Southern Mongolian dialects are closer to Khalkha than they are to eastern Southern Mongolian dialects: for example, Chakhar is closer to Khalkha than to Khorchin.
Besides Mongolian, or "Central Mongolic", other languages in the Mongolic grouping include Dagur
, spoken in eastern Inner Mongolia
, Heilongjiang
, and in the vicinity of Tacheng
in Xinjiang
; the Shirongolic subgroup Shira Yugur
, Bonan
, Dongxiang
, Monguor, and Kangjia
, spoken in China's Qinghai
and Gansu
regions; and the possibly extinct Moghol
of Afghanistan.
As for the classification of the Mongolic family relative to other languages, the Altaic theory (which is increasingly less well received among linguists) proposes that the Mongolic family is a member of a larger Altaic family
that would also include the Turkic
and Tungusic
, and usually Korean
and Japonic languages
as well.
section describes the Khalkha dialect as spoken in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital. The phonologies of other varieties such as Ordos, Khorchin, and even Chakhar, differ considerably. In contrast, most of what is said about morphology and syntax also holds true for Chakhar, while Khorchin is somewhat more diverse.
of Khalkha Mongolian will be discussed in sections on Vowels, Consonants, Phonotactics and Stress.
vowel phonemes. They are divided into (or "aligned into", to use phonology jargon) three vowel harmony
groups by a parameter called ATR (advanced tongue root); the groups are −ATR, +ATR, and neutral. This alignment seems to have superseded an alignment according to oral backness. However, some scholars still describe Mongolian as being characterized by a distinction between front vowels and back vowels, and the front vowel spellings 'ö' and 'ü' are still often used in the West to indicate two vowels which were historically front. The Mongolian vowel system also has rounding harmony.
Length is phonemic for vowels, and each of the seven phonemes occurs short or long. Phonetically, short /o/ is highly divergent from long /o/, being the central vowel [ɵ].
In the following table, the seven vowel phonemes, with their length variants, are arranged and described phonetically.
Khalkha also has four diphthong
s: /ui, ʊi, ɔi, ai/.
ATR harmony. Mongolian divides vowels into three groups in a system of vowel harmony
:
As mentioned, for historical reasons these have traditionally been labeled as "front" vowels and "back" vowels. Indeed, in Romanized
transcription of Mongolian, the vowels /o/ and /u/ are often conventionally rendered as ⟨ö⟩ and ⟨ü⟩, while the vowels /ɔ/ and /ʊ/ are expressed as ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩ (this is also the case in the nonphonological sections of this article). However, for modern Mongolian phonology, it seems more appropriate to instead characterize the two vowel-harmony groups by the dimension of tongue root position. There is also one neutral vowel, /i/, not belonging to either group.
All the vowels in a noncompound
word, including all its suffixes, must belong to the same group. If the first vowel is −ATR, then every vowel of the word must be either /i/ or a −ATR vowel. Likewise, if the first vowel is a +ATR vowel, then every vowel of the word must be either /i/ or a +ATR vowel. In the case of suffixes, which must change their vowels to conform to different words, two patterns predominate. Some suffixes contain an archiphoneme /A/ that can be realized as /a, ɔ, e, o/. For example:
household || + || -Ar (instrumental) || → || orxor by a household sentry || + || -Ar (instrumental) || → || xarʊɮar by a sentry
Other suffixes can occur in /U/ being realized as /ʊ, u/, in which case all −ATR vowels lead to /ʊ/ and all +ATR vowels lead to /u/. For example:
to take || + || -Uɮ (causative) || → || awʊɮ
If the only vowel in the word stem is /i/, the suffixes will use the +ATR suffix forms.
Rounding harmony. Mongolian also has rounding harmony, which does not apply to close vowels. If a stem contains /o/ (or /ɔ/), a suffix that is specified for an open vowel will have [o] (or [ɔ], respectively) as well. However, this process is blocked by the presence of /u/ (or /ʊ/) and /ei/. E.g. ɔr-ɮɔ came in, but ɔr-ʊɮ-ɮa inserted.
Vowel length. The pronunciation of long and short vowel
s depends on the syllable
's position in the word. In word-initial syllables there is a phonemic
contrast in length
. A long vowel has about 208% the length of a short vowel. In word-medial and word-final syllables, formerly long vowels are now only 127% as long as short vowels in initial syllables, but they are still distinct from initial-syllable short vowels. Short vowels in noninitial syllables differ from short vowels in initial syllables by being only 71% as long and by being centralized in articulation. As they are nonphonemic, their position is determined
according to phonotactic
requirements.
Mongolian lacks the voiced lateral approximant, [l]; instead, it has a voiced alveolar lateral fricative, /ɮ/, which is often realized as voiceless [ɬ]. In word-final position, /n/ (if not followed by a vowel in historical forms) is realized as [ŋ]. The occurrence of palatalized consonant phonemes seems to be restricted to words that contain [−ATR] vowels.
is CVVCCC, where the last C is a word-final suffix. A single short vowel rarely appears in syllable-final position
. If a word was monosyllabic historically, *CV has become CVV. [ŋ] is restricted to codas (else it becomes [n]), and /p/ and /pʲ/ do not occur in codas for historical reasons. For two-consonant clusters, the following restrictions obtain:
Clusters that do not conform to these restrictions will be broken up by an epenthetic
nonphonemic vowel in a syllabification that takes place from right to left. For example, hojor 'two', ažil 'work', and saarmag 'neutral' are, phonemically, /xɔjr/, /atʃɮ/, and /saːrmɡ/ respectively. In such cases, an epenthetic vowel is inserted so as to prevent disallowed consonant clusters. Thus, in the examples given above, the words are phonetically [xɔjɔ̆r], [atʃĭɮ], and [saːrmăɢ]. The phonetic form of the epenthetic vowel follows from vowel harmony triggered by the vowel in the preceding syllable. Usually it is a centralized version of the same sound, with the following exceptions: preceding /u/ produces [e]; /i/ will be ignored if there is a nonneutral vowel earlier in the word; and a postalveolar or palatalized consonant will be followed by an epenthetic [i], as in [atʃĭɮ].
in Mongolian is nonphonemic (does not distinguish different meanings) and thus is considered to depend entirely on syllable structure. But scholarly opinions on stress placement diverge sharply. Most native linguists, regardless of which dialect they speak, claim that stress falls on the first syllable. Between 1941 and 1975, several Western scholars proposed that the leftmost heavy syllable gets the stress. Yet other positions were taken in works published between 1835 and 1915.
Walker (1997) proposes that stress falls on the rightmost heavy syllable
unless this syllable is word-final:
A "heavy syllable" is here defined as one that is at least the length of a full vowel; short word-initial syllables are thereby excluded. If a word is bisyllabic and the only heavy syllable is word-final, it gets stressed anyway. In cases where there is only one phonemic short word-initial syllable, even this syllable can get the stress:
More recently, the most extensive collection of phonetic data so far in Mongolian studies has been applied to a partial account of stress placement in the closely related Chakhar dialect. The conclusion is drawn that di- and trisyllabic words with a short first syllable are stressed on the second syllable. But if their first syllable is long, then the data for different acoustic parameters seems to support conflicting conclusions: intensity
data often seems to indicate that the first syllable is stressed, while F0
seems to indicate that it is the second syllable that is stressed.
, almost exclusively suffixing language, the only exception being reduplication. Most of the suffixes consist of a single morpheme
. There are many derivation
al morphemes. For example, the word bajguullagynh consists of the root baj- 'to be', an epenthetic
-g-, the causative
-uul- (hence 'to found'), the derivative
suffix -laga that forms nouns created by the action (like -ation in 'organisation') and the complex suffix –ynh denoting something that belongs to the modified word (-yn would be genitive
).
Nominal compounds
are quite frequent. Some derivational verbal suffixes are rather productive
, e.g. jar' - 'to speak', jarilts- 'to speak with each other'. Formally, the independent words derived using verbal suffixes can roughly be divided into three classes: final verb
s, which can only be used sentence-finally, i.e. -na (mainly future or generic statements) or –ø (second person imperative); participle
s (often called "verbal nouns"), which can be used clause-finally or attributively, i.e. -san (perfect-past
) or -maar ('want to'); and converbs, which can link clauses or function adverbial
ly, i.e. -ž (qualifies for any adverbial function or neutrally connects two sentences
) or -tal (the action of the main clause
takes place until the action expressed by the suffixed verb begins).
Roughly speaking, Mongolian has eight cases
: nominative
(unmarked
), genitive
, dative
, accusative
, ablative
, instrumental
, comitative
and directional
. If a direct object is definite
, it must take the accusative, while it must take the nominative if it is unspecific
. In addition to case, a number of postpositions exist that usually govern genitive, ablative, or comitative case or a form of the nominative that has sometimes -Vn either for lexical historical reasons or analogy
(thus maybe becoming an attributive case suffix). Noun
s can take reflexive-possessive clitic
s indicating that the marked noun is possessed by the subject
of the sentence: bi najz(-)aa avarsan I friend- save- 'I saved my friend'. However, there are also somewhat noun-like adjective
s to which case suffixes seemingly cannot be attached directly unless there is ellipsis
. Plural
ity may be left unmarked, but there are overt plurality markers, some of which are restricted to humans. A noun that is modified by a numeral usually does not take any plural affix.
Personal pronoun
s exist for the first and second person, while the old demonstrative pronouns have come to form third person (proximal and distal) pronouns. Other word (sub-)classes include interrogative pronouns, conjunctions
(which take participles), spatials, and particles
, the last being rather numerous.
Negation is mostly expressed by -güj after participles and by the negation particle biš after nouns and adjectives; negation particles preceding the verb (for example in converbal constructions) exist, but tend to be replaced by analytical constructions.
has the order: demonstrative pronoun/numeral
, adjective, noun. Attributive sentences precede the whole NP. Titles or occupations of people, low numerals indicating groups, and focus clitics are put behind the head noun. Possessive pronoun
s (in different forms) may either precede or follow the NP. Examples:
The verbal phrase consists of the predicate
in the center, preceded by its complements
and by the adverbials modifying it and followed (mainly if the predicate is sentence-final) by modal particle
s, as in the following example with predicate bičsen:
In this clause the adverbial, helehgüjgeer 'without saying [so]' must precede the predicate's complement, üünijg 'it-' in order to avoid syntactic ambiguity, since helehgüjgeer is itself derived from a verb and hence an üünijg preceding it could be construed as its complement. If the adverbial was an adjective such as hurdan 'fast', it could optionally immediately precede the predicate. There are also cases in which the adverb must immediately precede the predicate.
For Khalkha, the most complete treatment of the verbal forms is Luvsanvandan (ed.) 1987. However, the analysis of predication presented here, while valid for Khalkha, is adapted from the description of Khorchin by Matsuoka 2007.
Most often, of course, the predicate consists of a verb. However, there are several types of nominal predicative constructions, with or without a copula. Auxiliaries
that express direction and aktionsart
(among other meanings) can with the assistance of a linking converb occupy the immediate postverbal position, e.g. uuž orhison drink- leave- 'drank up'. The next position is filled by converb suffixes in connection with the auxiliary, baj- 'to be', e.g. ter güjž bajna s/he run- be- 'she is running'. Suffixes occupying this position express grammatical aspect
, e.g., progressive and resultative
. In the next position, participles followed by baj- may follow, e.g., ter irsen bajna s/he come- be- 'he has come'. Here, an explicit perfect and habituality can be marked, which is aspectual in meaning as well. This position may be occupied by multiple suffixes in a single predication, and it can still be followed by a converbal Progressive. The last position is occupied by suffixes that express tense, evidentiality, modality, and aspect.
–object
–predicate. While the predicate generally has to remain in clause-final position, the other phrases are free to change order or to wholly disappear. The topic tends to be placed clause-initially, new information rather at the end of the clause. Topic can be overtly marked with bol, which can also mark contrastive focus, overt additive focus ('even, also') can be marked with the clitic č, and overt restrictive focus with the clitic l ('only').
The inventory of voices in Mongolian consists of passive, causative
, reciprocal
, plurative, and cooperative. In a passive sentence, the verb takes the suffix -gd- and the agent takes either dative or instrumental case, the first of which is more common. In the causative, the verb takes the suffix -uul-, the causee (the person caused to do something) in a transitive action (e.g., 'lift') takes dative or instrumental case, and the causee in an intransitive action (e.g., 'walk') takes accusative case. Causative morphology is also used in some passive contexts:
The semantic attribute of animacy
is syntactically important: thus the sentence, 'the bread was eaten by me', which is acceptable in English, would not be acceptable in Mongolian. The reciprocal voice is marked by -ld-, the plurative by -tsgaa-, and the cooperative by -lts-.
Mongolian allows for adjectival depictives that relate to either the subject or the direct object, e.g. Ljena nücgen untdag 'Lena sleeps naked', while adjectival resultatives are marginal.
Some verbal nouns in the dative (or less often in the instrumental) function very similar to converbs: e.g., replacing olbol in the preceding sentence with olohod find- yields 'when we find it we'll give it to you'. Quite often, postpositions govern complete clauses. In contrast, conjunctions take verbal nouns without case:
Finally, there is a class of particles, usually clause-initial, that are distinct from conjunctions but that also relate clauses: bi olson, harin čamd ögöhgüj I find- but you- give- 'I've found it, but I won't give it to you'.
Mongolian has a complementizer
auxiliary verb
ge- very similar to Japanese
to iu. ge- literally means 'to say' and in converbal form gež precedes either a psych verb or a verb of saying. As a verbal noun like gedeg (with n' or case) it can form a subset of complement clauses. As gene it may function as an evidentialis
marker.
Mongolian clauses tend to be combined paratactically, which sometimes gives rise to sentence structures which are subordinative despite resembling coordinative structures in European languages:
In the subordinate clause the subject, if different from the subject of main clause, sometimes has to take accusative or genitive case. There is marginal occurrence of subjects taking ablative case as well. Subjects of attributive clauses in which the head has a function (as is the case for all English relative clause
s) usually require that if the subject is not the head
, then it take the genitive, e.g. tüünij idsen hool that.one- eat- meal 'the meal that s/he had eaten'.
s from Old Turkic, Sanskrit
(these often through Uighur), Persian
, Arabic
, Tibetan
, Tungusic
, and Chinese
. Recent loanwords come from Russian
, English
, and Chinese (mainly in Inner Mongolia). Language commissions of the Mongolian state have been busy translating new terminology
into Mongolian, so that the Mongolian vocabulary now has jerönhijlögč 'president' ("generalizer") and šar ajrag 'beer' ("yellow kumys"). There are quite a few loan translations
, e.g. galt tereg 'train' ('fire-having cart') from Chinese huǒchē (火车, fire cart) 'train'.
was adapted from Uyghur script
probably at the very beginning of the 13th century and from that time underwent some minor disambiguations and supplementations. Between 1930 and 1932, a short-lived attempt was made to introduce the Latin script
in the Mongolian state, and after a preparatory phase, the Mongolian Cyrillic script was declared mandatory by government decree. It has been argued that the 1941 introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet
, with its smaller discrepancy between written and spoken form, contributed to the success of the large-scale government literacy
campaign, which increased the literacy rate from 17.3% to 73.5% between 1941 and 1950. Earlier government campaigns to eradicate illiteracy, employing the traditional script, had only managed to raise literacy from 3.0% to 17.3% between 1921 and 1940. From 1991 to 1994, an attempt at reintroducing the traditional alphabet failed in the face of popular resistance. In informal contexts of electronic text production, the use of the Latin alphabet is common.
In the People's Republic of China
, Mongolian is a co-official language with Mandarin Chinese
in some regions, notably the entire Inner Mongolia
Autonomous Region. The traditional alphabet has always been used there, although Cyrillic was considered briefly before the Sino-Soviet split
. There are two types of written Mongolian used in China: the traditional Mongolian script, which is official among Mongols nationwide, and the Clear script, used predominantly among Oirats
in Xinjiang
.
The earliest surviving Mongolian text may be the Stele of Yisüngge, a report on sports composed in Mongolian script
on stone, which is most often dated at 1224 or 1225. The Mongolian-Armenian
wordlist of 55 words compiled by Kirakos Gandzaketsi
(13th century) is the first written record of Mongolian words. From the 13th to the 15th centuries, Mongolian language texts were written in four scripts (not counting some vocabulary written in Western scripts): Uighur Mongolian (UM) script (an adaptation of the Uighur alphabet), Phagspa
(Ph) (used in decrees), Chinese
(SM) (The Secret History of the Mongols
), and Arabic
(AM) (used in dictionaries). While they are the earliest texts available, these texts have come to be called "Middle Mongolian" in scholarly practice. The documents in UM script show some distinct linguistic characteristics and are therefore often distinguished by terming their language "Preclassical Mongolian".
The next distinct period is Classical Mongolian
, which is dated from the 17th to the 19th century. This is a written language with a high degree of standardization in orthography and syntax that sets it quite apart from the subsequent Modern Mongolian. The most notable documents in this language are the Mongolian Kanjur and Tanjur as well as several chronicles. In 1686, the Soyombo script
(Buddhist texts) was created, giving distinctive evidence on early classical Mongolian phonological peculiarities.
> Khalkha deel.
The palatal affricates *č, *čʰ were fronted in Northern Modern Mongolian dialects such as Khalkha. *kʰ was spirantized to /x/ in Ulaanbaatar Khalkha and the Mongolian dialects south of it, e.g. Preclassical Mongolian kündü, reconstructed as *kʰynty 'heavy', became Modern Mongolian /xunt/ (but in the vicinity of Bayankhongor
and Baruun-Urt
, many speakers will say [kʰunt]). Originally word-final *n turned into /ŋ/; if *n was originally followed by a vowel that later dropped, it remained unchanged, e.g. *kʰen became /xiŋ/, but *kʰoina became /xɔin/. After i-breaking, *[ʃ] became phonemic. Consonants in words containing back vowels that were followed by *i in Proto-Mongolian became palatalized
in Modern Mongolian. In some words, word-final *n was dropped with most case forms, but still appears with the ablative, dative and genitive.
to /u/ and /o/. Thus, the vowel harmony shifted from a velar to a pharyngeal paradigm. *i in the first syllable of back-vocalic words was assimilated
to the following vowel; in word-initial position it became /ja/. *e was rounded to *ø when followed by *y. VhV and VjV sequences where the second vowel was any vowel but *i were monophthongized. In noninitial syllables, short vowels were deleted from the phonetic representation of the word and long vowels became short.
E.g. *imahan (*i becomes /ja/, *h disappears) → *jamaːn (unstable n drops; vowel reduction) → /jama(n)/ 'goat'
and *emys- (regressive rounding assimilation) → *ømys- (vowel velarization) → *omus- (vowel reduction) → /oms-/ 'to wear'
This reconstruction has recently been opposed, arguing that postulating a number of sound changes is not necessary if one reconstructs basically the same vowel system as Khalkha, but with *[ə] instead of *[e]. Moreover, the sound changes involved in this alternative scenario are more likely from an articulatory
point of view and early Middle Mongolian loans into Korean
.
"-shaped bracket, and to the right of each such bracket, there are other medium-sized characters|The Secret History of the Mongols
is the only document that allows the reconstruction of agreement in social gender in Middle Mongolian.]]
In the following discussion, in accordance with a preceding observation, the term "Middle Mongolian" is used merely as a cover term for texts written in any of three scripts, Uighur Mongolian script (UM), Chinese (SM), or Arabic (AM).
The case system of Middle Mongolian 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 Mongolian comitative -luγ-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' toj 'having a horse/with a horse'. As this adjective functioned parallel to ügej 'not having', it has been suggested that a "privative case" ('without') has been introduced into Mongolian. There have been three different case suffixes in the dative-locative-directive domain that are grouped in different ways: -a as locative and -dur, -da as dative or -da and -a as dative and -dur as locative, in both cases with some functional overlapping. As -dur seems to be grammaticalized from dotur-a 'within', thus indicating a span of time, the second account seems to be more likely. Of these, -da was lost, -dur was first reduced to -du and then to -d and -a only survived in a few frozen environments. Finally, the directive of modern Mongolian, -ruu, has been innovated from uruγu 'downwards'. Social gender agreement was abandoned.
The syntax of verb negation shifted from negation particles preceding final verbs to a negation particle following participles; thus, as final verbs could no longer be negated, their paradigm of negation was filled by particles. For example, Preclassical Mongolian ese irebe 'did not come' vs. modern spoken Khalkha Mongolian ireegüj or irsengüj.
Mongolian script
The classical Mongolian script , also known as Uyghurjin, was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946...
:
, ; in Mongolian CyrillicMongolian Cyrillic alphabet
The Mongolian Cyrillic script is the writing system used for the Khalkha dialect of the Mongolian language as the standard dialect of the modern state of Mongolia. Cyrillic has not been adopted by the Khalkha in the Inner Mongolia region of China, who still use the Mongolian script.Mongolian...
: ) is the official language of Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family
Mongolic languages
The Mongolic languages are a group of languages spoken in East-Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas plus in Kalmykia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongolian residents of Inner...
. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
and many of the Mongolian
Mongols
Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...
residents of the Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in the northern region of the country. Inner Mongolia shares an international border with the countries of Mongolia and the Russian Federation...
autonomous region of China. In Mongolia, the Khalkha dialect
Khalkha dialect
The Khalkha dialect is a dialect of Mongolian widely spoken in Mongolia and according to some classifications includes such South Mongolian varieties such as Shiliin gol, Ulaanchab and Sönid...
, written in Cyrillic, is predominant, while in Inner Mongolia, the language is more dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
ally diverse and is written in the traditional Mongolian script
Mongolian script
The classical Mongolian script , also known as Uyghurjin, was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946...
. In the discussion of grammar to follow, the variety of Mongolian treated is Standard Khalkha Mongolian (i.e., the standard written language as formalized in the writing conventions and in the school grammar), but much of what is to be said is also valid for vernacular (spoken) Khalkha and other Mongolian dialects, especially Chakhar.
Mongolian has vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
and a complex syllabic structure for a Mongolic language that allows clusters of up to three consonants syllable-finally. It is a typical agglutinative language
Agglutination
In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages...
that relies on suffix chains in the verbal and nominal domains. While there is a basic word order, subject–object–predicate, ordering among noun phrase
Noun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
s is relatively free, so grammatical roles are indicated by a system of about eight grammatical case
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
s. There are five voices. Verbs are marked for voice, aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
, tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
, and epistemic modality
Linguistic modality
In linguistics, modality is what allows speakers to evaluate a proposition relative to a set of other propositions.In standard formal approaches to modality, an utterance expressing modality can always roughly be paraphrased to fit the following template:...
/evidentiality
Evidentiality
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality...
. In sentence linking, a special role is played by converbs.
Modern Mongolian evolved from "Middle Mongolian", the language spoken in the Mongol Empire
Mongol Empire
The Mongol Empire , initially named as Greater Mongol State was a great empire during the 13th and 14th centuries...
of the 13th and 14th centuries. In the transition, a major shift in the vowel harmony paradigm occurred, long vowels
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
developed, the case system was slightly reformed, and the verbal system was restructured.
Geographic distribution
Mongolian is the national language of the country of MongoliaMongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
, where it is spoken by about 2.7 million people, and an official language of China's Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in the northern region of the country. Inner Mongolia shares an international border with the countries of Mongolia and the Russian Federation...
region, where it is spoken by 2.7 million or more people. The exact number of Mongolian speakers in China is hard to determine, as there is no data available on Chinese citizens' language proficiency. There are roughly five million ethnic Mongolians in China, but the use of Mongolian is in decline among them, especially among younger speakers in urban areas, due to the dominance of Mandarin Chinese. The great majority of speakers of Mongolian proper in China live in Inner Mongolia; in addition, some speakers of the Kharchin and Khorchin dialect
Khorchin dialect
The Khorchin dialect is a variety of Mongolian spoken in the east of Inner Mongolia, namely in Hinggan League, in the north, north-east and east of Hinggan and in all but the south of the Tongliao region...
s live in areas of Liaoning
Liaoning
' is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the northeast of the country. Its one-character abbreviation is "辽" , a name taken from the Liao River that flows through the province. "Níng" means "peace"...
, Jilin
Jilin
Jilin , is a province of the People's Republic of China located in the northeastern part of the country. Jilin borders North Korea and Russia to the east, Heilongjiang to the north, Liaoning to the south, and Inner Mongolia to the west...
, and Heilongjiang
Heilongjiang
For the river known in Mandarin as Heilong Jiang, see Amur River' is a province of the People's Republic of China located in the northeastern part of the country. "Heilongjiang" literally means Black Dragon River, which is the Chinese name for the Amur. The one-character abbreviation is 黑...
that border Inner Mongolia. According to Uradyn E. Bulag, anthropologist at Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
, New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, USA, Mongols are displaying significant linguistic anxiety about losing their language and linguistic identity to powerful Chinese nationalistic and cultural forces.
Classification and dialects
Mongolic languages
The Mongolic languages are a group of languages spoken in East-Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas plus in Kalmykia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongolian residents of Inner...
. The delimitation of the Mongolian language within Mongolic is a much disputed theoretical problem, one whose resolution is impeded by the fact that existing data for the major varieties
Variety (linguistics)
In sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard variety itself...
is not easily arrangeable according to a common set of linguistic criteria. Such data might account for the historical
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
development of the Mongolian dialect continuum
Dialect continuum
A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the...
, as well as for its sociolinguistic
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
qualities. Though phonological and lexical studies are comparatively well developed, the basis has yet to be laid for a comparative morphosyntactic
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
study, for example between such highly diverse varieties as Khalkha
Khalkha dialect
The Khalkha dialect is a dialect of Mongolian widely spoken in Mongolia and according to some classifications includes such South Mongolian varieties such as Shiliin gol, Ulaanchab and Sönid...
and Khorchin.
The status of certain varieties in the Mongolic group—whether they are languages distinct from Mongolian or just dialects of it—is disputed. There are at least three such varieties: Oirat
Oirat language
Oirat belongs to the group of Mongolic languages. Scholars differ as to whether Oirat is a distinct language or a major dialect of the Mongolian language...
(including the Kalmyk variety
Kalmyk language
The Kalmyk language , or Russian Oirat, is the native speech of the Kalmyk people of the Republic of Kalmykia, a federal subject of the Russian Federation. In Russia, it is the normative form of the Oirat language , which belongs to the Mongolic language family...
) and Buryat
Buryat language
Buryat is a Mongolic variety spoken by the Buryats that is either classified as a language or as a major dialect group of Mongolian. The majority of Buryat speakers live in Russia along the northern border of Mongolia where it is an official language in the Buryat Republic, Ust-Orda Buryatia and...
, both of which are spoken in Russia, Mongolia, and China; and Ordos
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...
, spoken around Inner Mongolia's Ordos City
Ordos City
Ordos is one of the twelve major subdivisions of Inner Mongolia, China. It is located within the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River. Although mainly rural, Ordos is administered as a prefecture-level city...
.
Chakhar dialect
The Chakhar dialect is a variety of Mongolian spoken the central region of Inner Mongolia. It is phonologically close to Khalkha and is the basis for the standard pronunciation of Mongolian in Inner Mongolia....
, and Ordos, with Buryat and Oirat judged to be independent languages. On the other hand, Luvsanvandan (1959) proposed a much broader "Mongolian language" consisting of a Central dialect (Khalkha, Chakhar, Ordos), an Eastern dialect (Kharchin, Khorchin), a Western dialect (Oirat, Kalmyk), and a Northern dialect (consisting of two Buryat varieties). Some Western scholars propose that the relatively well researched Ordos variety is an independent language due to its conservative syllable structure and phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
inventory. While the placement of a variety like Alasha
Alasha dialect
Alasha ; Mongolian script Alaša, Chinese 阿拉善 Ālāshàn), or ', is a variety in-between Oirat and Mongolian that historically used to belong to Oirat but has come under the influence of Mongolian proper. It is spoken by well above 40.000 speakers in Alasha league in South Mongolia and consists of two...
, which is under the cultural influence of Inner Mongolia but historically tied to Oirat, and of other border varieties like Darkhad would very likely remain problematic in any classification, the central problem remains the question of how to classify Chakhar, Khalkha, and Khorchin in relation to each other and in relation to Buryat and Oirat . The split of [tʃ] into [tʃ] before *i and [ts] before all other reconstructed vowels, which is found in Mongolia but not in Inner Mongolia, is often cited as a fundamental distinction, for example Proto-Mongolic *tʃil, Khalkha /tʃiɮ/, Chakhar /tʃil/ 'year' versus Proto-Mongolic *tʃøhelen, Khalkha /tsooɮəŋ/, Chakhar /tʃooləŋ/ 'few'. On the other hand, the split between the past tense verbal suffixes -sŋ in the Central varieties vs. -dʒɛː in the Eastern varieties is usually seen as a merely stochastic
Stochastic
Stochastic refers to systems whose behaviour is intrinsically non-deterministic. A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic, in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element. However, according to M. Kac and E...
difference.
In Inner Mongolia, official language policy divides the Mongolian language into three dialects: Southern Mongolian, Oirat, and Barghu-Buryat. Southern Mongolian is said to consist of Chakhar, Ordos, Baarin
Baarin dialect
Baarin is a dialect of Mongolian spoken mainly in Inner Mongolia.-Location and classification:...
, Khorchin, Kharchin, and Alasha. The authorities have synthesized a literary standard
Standard language
A standard language is a language variety used by a group of people in their public discourse. Alternatively, varieties become standard by undergoing a process of standardization, during which it is organized for description in grammars and dictionaries and encoded in such reference works...
for Mongolian in China whose grammar is said to be based on Southern Mongolian and whose pronunciation is based on the Chakhar dialect as spoken in the Plain Blue Banner
Eight Banners
The Eight Banners were administrative divisions into which all Manchu families were placed. They provided the basic framework for the Manchu military organization...
. Dialectologically, however, western Southern Mongolian dialects are closer to Khalkha than they are to eastern Southern Mongolian dialects: for example, Chakhar is closer to Khalkha than to Khorchin.
Besides Mongolian, or "Central Mongolic", other languages in the Mongolic grouping include Dagur
Daur language
The Daur or Dagur language is a Mongolic language primarily spoken by members of the Daur ethnic group.-Distribution:Daur is a Mongolic language consisting of four dialects: Amur Daur in the vicinity of Heihe, the Nonni Daur on the west side of the Nonni River from south of Qiqihaer up to the Morin...
, spoken in eastern Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in the northern region of the country. Inner Mongolia shares an international border with the countries of Mongolia and the Russian Federation...
, Heilongjiang
Heilongjiang
For the river known in Mandarin as Heilong Jiang, see Amur River' is a province of the People's Republic of China located in the northeastern part of the country. "Heilongjiang" literally means Black Dragon River, which is the Chinese name for the Amur. The one-character abbreviation is 黑...
, and in the vicinity of Tacheng
Tacheng
-References:* Khālidī, Qurbanʻali, Allen J. Frank, and Mirkasym Abdulakhatovich Usmanov. An Islamic Biographical Dictionary of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe, 1770-1912. Brill's Inner Asian library, v. 12. Leiden: Brill, 2004....
in Xinjiang
Xinjiang
Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...
; the Shirongolic subgroup Shira Yugur
Eastern Yugur language
Eastern Yugur and Western Yugur are terms coined by Chinese linguists to distinguish between the Mongolic and Turkic Yugur language, both spoken within the Yugur nationality. The terms may also indicate the speakers of these languages. Traditionally, both languages are indicated by the term Yellow...
, Bonan
Bonan language
The Bonan language is the Mongolic language of the Bonan people of China. As of 1985, it was spoken by about 8,000 people, including about 75% of the total Baonan ethnic population and many ethnic Monguor, in Gansu and Qinghai Provinces and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture...
, Dongxiang
Dongxiang language
The Santa language, also known as Dongxiang , is a Mongolic language spoken by the Dongxiang people in northwest China.-Grammar:In common with other Mongolic languages, Dongxiang is basically a subject–object–verb language...
, Monguor, and Kangjia
Kangjia language
The Kangjia language is a recently-discovered Mongolic language spoken by a Muslim population of around 300 people in Jainca County, Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai province of China...
, spoken in China's Qinghai
Qinghai
Qinghai ; Oirat Mongolian: ; ; Salar:) is a province of the People's Republic of China, named after Qinghai Lake...
and Gansu
Gansu
' is a province located in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.It lies between the Tibetan and Huangtu plateaus, and borders Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia to the north, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the west, Sichuan to the south, and Shaanxi to the east...
regions; and the possibly extinct Moghol
Moghol language
Moghol is a Mongolic language spoken in the region of Herat, Afghanistan, by a few members of the Hazara community. In the 1970s, when the German scholar Michael Weiers did fieldwork on the language, few people spoke the language, most knew it passively and most were older than 40...
of Afghanistan.
As for the classification of the Mongolic family relative to other languages, the Altaic theory (which is increasingly less well received among linguists) proposes that the Mongolic family is a member of a larger Altaic family
Altaic languages
Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
that would also include the Turkic
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
and Tungusic
Tungusic languages
The Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...
, and usually Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
and Japonic languages
Japonic languages
Japonic languages is a term which identifies and characterises the Japanese which is spoken on the main islands of Japan and the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. This widely accepted linguistics term was coined by Leon Serafim....
as well.
Grammar
The following description is based primarily on Khalkha Mongolian. In particular, the phonologyPhonology
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...
section describes the Khalkha dialect as spoken in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital. The phonologies of other varieties such as Ordos, Khorchin, and even Chakhar, differ considerably. In contrast, most of what is said about morphology and syntax also holds true for Chakhar, while Khorchin is somewhat more diverse.
Phonology
In this section, the phonologyPhonology
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...
of Khalkha Mongolian will be discussed in sections on Vowels, Consonants, Phonotactics and Stress.
Vowels
The standard language has seven monophthongMonophthong
A monophthong is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation....
vowel phonemes. They are divided into (or "aligned into", to use phonology jargon) three vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
groups by a parameter called ATR (advanced tongue root); the groups are −ATR, +ATR, and neutral. This alignment seems to have superseded an alignment according to oral backness. However, some scholars still describe Mongolian as being characterized by a distinction between front vowels and back vowels, and the front vowel spellings 'ö' and 'ü' are still often used in the West to indicate two vowels which were historically front. The Mongolian vowel system also has rounding harmony.
Length is phonemic for vowels, and each of the seven phonemes occurs short or long. Phonetically, short /o/ is highly divergent from long /o/, being the central vowel [ɵ].
In the following table, the seven vowel phonemes, with their length variants, are arranged and described phonetically.
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short | Long | Short | Long | Short | Long | |
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
i | iː | u | uː | ||
| Near-Close Near-close vowel A near-close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-close vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to a close vowel, but slightly less constricted. Near-close vowels are sometimes described as lax variants of the fully close vowels... |
ʊ | ʊː | ||||
| Close-Mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel... |
e | eː | o [ɵ] | oː | ||
| Open-mid Open-mid vowel An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel... |
ɔ | ɔː | ||||
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
a | aː |
Khalkha also has four diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s: /ui, ʊi, ɔi, ai/.
ATR harmony. Mongolian divides vowels into three groups in a system of vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
:
| +ATR ("front") | −ATR ("back") | Neutral |
|---|---|---|
| e, u, o | a, ʊ, ɔ | i |
As mentioned, for historical reasons these have traditionally been labeled as "front" vowels and "back" vowels. Indeed, in Romanized
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
transcription of Mongolian, the vowels /o/ and /u/ are often conventionally rendered as ⟨ö⟩ and ⟨ü⟩, while the vowels /ɔ/ and /ʊ/ are expressed as ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩ (this is also the case in the nonphonological sections of this article). However, for modern Mongolian phonology, it seems more appropriate to instead characterize the two vowel-harmony groups by the dimension of tongue root position. There is also one neutral vowel, /i/, not belonging to either group.
All the vowels in a noncompound
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
word, including all its suffixes, must belong to the same group. If the first vowel is −ATR, then every vowel of the word must be either /i/ or a −ATR vowel. Likewise, if the first vowel is a +ATR vowel, then every vowel of the word must be either /i/ or a +ATR vowel. In the case of suffixes, which must change their vowels to conform to different words, two patterns predominate. Some suffixes contain an archiphoneme /A/ that can be realized as /a, ɔ, e, o/. For example:
household || + || -Ar (instrumental) || → || orxor by a household sentry || + || -Ar (instrumental) || → || xarʊɮar by a sentry
Other suffixes can occur in /U/ being realized as /ʊ, u/, in which case all −ATR vowels lead to /ʊ/ and all +ATR vowels lead to /u/. For example:
to take || + || -Uɮ (causative) || → || awʊɮ
If the only vowel in the word stem is /i/, the suffixes will use the +ATR suffix forms.
Rounding harmony. Mongolian also has rounding harmony, which does not apply to close vowels. If a stem contains /o/ (or /ɔ/), a suffix that is specified for an open vowel will have [o] (or [ɔ], respectively) as well. However, this process is blocked by the presence of /u/ (or /ʊ/) and /ei/. E.g. ɔr-ɮɔ came in, but ɔr-ʊɮ-ɮa inserted.
Vowel length. The pronunciation of long and short vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s depends on the syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
's position in the word. In word-initial syllables there is a phonemic
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
contrast in length
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
. A long vowel has about 208% the length of a short vowel. In word-medial and word-final syllables, formerly long vowels are now only 127% as long as short vowels in initial syllables, but they are still distinct from initial-syllable short vowels. Short vowels in noninitial syllables differ from short vowels in initial syllables by being only 71% as long and by being centralized in articulation. As they are nonphonemic, their position is determined
Syllabification
Syllabification is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written.It is also used to describe the process of something like a consonant turning into a syllable, but this is not discussed here...
according to phonotactic
Phonotactics
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
requirements.
Consonants
The following table lists the consonants of Khalkha Mongolian. The consonants enclosed in parentheses occur only in loanwords.| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Dental | Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and... |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain | Palatalized Palatalization In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate.... |
Plain | Palatalized Palatalization In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate.... |
Palatalized Palatalization In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate.... |
Plain | ||||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | mʲ | n | nʲ | ŋ | ||||
| Plosive | Voiceless aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
(pʰ) | (pʲʰ) | tʰ | tʲʰ | (kʲʰ) | (kʰ) | ||
| Voiceless | p | pʲ | t | tʲ | |||||
| Voiced | ɡʲ | ɡ | ɢ | ||||||
| Affricate | Voiceless aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
tsʰ | tʃʰ | ||||||
| Voiceless | ts | tʃ | |||||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
(f) | s | ʃ | xʲ | x | ||||
| Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth.... fricative |
ɮ | ɮʲ | |||||||
| Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular.... |
r | rʲ | |||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
w̜ | w̜ʲ | j | ||||||
Mongolian lacks the voiced lateral approximant, [l]; instead, it has a voiced alveolar lateral fricative, /ɮ/, which is often realized as voiceless [ɬ]. In word-final position, /n/ (if not followed by a vowel in historical forms) is realized as [ŋ]. The occurrence of palatalized consonant phonemes seems to be restricted to words that contain [−ATR] vowels.
Syllable structure and phonotactics
The maximal syllableSyllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
is CVVCCC, where the last C is a word-final suffix. A single short vowel rarely appears in syllable-final position
Syllable coda
In phonology, a syllable coda comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the nucleus, which is usually a vowel. The combination of a nucleus and a coda is called a rime. Some syllables consist only of a nucleus with no coda...
. If a word was monosyllabic historically, *CV has become CVV. [ŋ] is restricted to codas (else it becomes [n]), and /p/ and /pʲ/ do not occur in codas for historical reasons. For two-consonant clusters, the following restrictions obtain:
- a palatalized consonant can be preceded only by another palatalized consonant or sometimes by /ɢ/ and /ʃ/ may precede only /ʃ, x, ɡ, ɡʲ/ and /ɢ/ does not seem to appear in second position and /pʲ/ do not occur as first consonant and as second consonant only if preceded by /m/ or /ɮ/ or their palatalized counterparts.
Clusters that do not conform to these restrictions will be broken up by an epenthetic
Epenthesis
In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....
nonphonemic vowel in a syllabification that takes place from right to left. For example, hojor 'two', ažil 'work', and saarmag 'neutral' are, phonemically, /xɔjr/, /atʃɮ/, and /saːrmɡ/ respectively. In such cases, an epenthetic vowel is inserted so as to prevent disallowed consonant clusters. Thus, in the examples given above, the words are phonetically [xɔjɔ̆r], [atʃĭɮ], and [saːrmăɢ]. The phonetic form of the epenthetic vowel follows from vowel harmony triggered by the vowel in the preceding syllable. Usually it is a centralized version of the same sound, with the following exceptions: preceding /u/ produces [e]; /i/ will be ignored if there is a nonneutral vowel earlier in the word; and a postalveolar or palatalized consonant will be followed by an epenthetic [i], as in [atʃĭɮ].
Stress
StressStress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
in Mongolian is nonphonemic (does not distinguish different meanings) and thus is considered to depend entirely on syllable structure. But scholarly opinions on stress placement diverge sharply. Most native linguists, regardless of which dialect they speak, claim that stress falls on the first syllable. Between 1941 and 1975, several Western scholars proposed that the leftmost heavy syllable gets the stress. Yet other positions were taken in works published between 1835 and 1915.
Walker (1997) proposes that stress falls on the rightmost heavy syllable
Syllable weight
In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line....
unless this syllable is word-final:
| HˈHLL | pai.ˈɢʊɮ. ɮəɢ.təx | to be organized |
| LHˈHL | xon.ti.ˈru.ɮəŋ | separating (adverbial) |
| LHHˈHL | ʊ.ɮan.paːtʰ.ˈrin.xəŋ | the residents of Ulaanbaatar |
| HˈHH | ʊːr.ˈtʰai.ɢar | angrily |
| ˈHLH | ˈʊitʰ.ɢər.tʰai | sad |
A "heavy syllable" is here defined as one that is at least the length of a full vowel; short word-initial syllables are thereby excluded. If a word is bisyllabic and the only heavy syllable is word-final, it gets stressed anyway. In cases where there is only one phonemic short word-initial syllable, even this syllable can get the stress:
| LˈH | ɢa.ˈɮʊ | goose |
| ˈLL | ˈʊnʃ.səŋ | having read |
More recently, the most extensive collection of phonetic data so far in Mongolian studies has been applied to a partial account of stress placement in the closely related Chakhar dialect. The conclusion is drawn that di- and trisyllabic words with a short first syllable are stressed on the second syllable. But if their first syllable is long, then the data for different acoustic parameters seems to support conflicting conclusions: intensity
Intensity (physics)
In physics, intensity is a measure of the energy flux, averaged over the period of the wave. The word "intensity" here is not synonymous with "strength", "amplitude", or "level", as it sometimes is in colloquial speech...
data often seems to indicate that the first syllable is stressed, while F0
Fundamental frequency
The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the fundamental and abbreviated f0, is defined as the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. In terms of a superposition of sinusoids The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the fundamental and abbreviated f0, is defined as the...
seems to indicate that it is the second syllable that is stressed.
Morphology
Modern Mongolian is an agglutinativeAgglutination
In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages...
, almost exclusively suffixing language, the only exception being reduplication. Most of the suffixes consist of a single morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
. There are many derivation
Derivation (linguistics)
In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...
al morphemes. For example, the word bajguullagynh consists of the root baj- 'to be', an epenthetic
Epenthesis
In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....
-g-, the causative
Causative
In linguistics, a causative is a form that indicates that a subject causes someone or something else to do or be something, or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event....
-uul- (hence 'to found'), the derivative
Derivation (linguistics)
In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...
suffix -laga that forms nouns created by the action (like -ation in 'organisation') and the complex suffix –ynh denoting something that belongs to the modified word (-yn would be genitive
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
).
Nominal compounds
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
are quite frequent. Some derivational verbal suffixes are rather productive
Productivity (linguistics)
In linguistics, productivity is the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation. Since use to produce novel structures is the clearest proof of usage of a grammatical process, the evidence most often appealed to as establishing productivity is...
, e.g. jar
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
s, which can only be used sentence-finally, i.e. -na (mainly future or generic statements) or –ø (second person imperative); participle
Participle
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
s (often called "verbal nouns"), which can be used clause-finally or attributively, i.e. -san (perfect-past
Past tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...
) or -maar ('want to'); and converbs, which can link clauses or function adverbial
Adverbial
In grammar an adverbial is a word or a group of words that modifies or tells us something about the sentence or the verb. The word adverbial is also used as an adjective, meaning 'having the same function as an adverb'...
ly, i.e. -ž (qualifies for any adverbial function or neutrally connects two sentences
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
) or -tal (the action of the main clause
Clause
In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. In some languages it may be a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in other languages in certain clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase,...
takes place until the action expressed by the suffixed verb begins).
Roughly speaking, Mongolian has eight cases
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
: nominative
Nominative case
The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
(unmarked
Markedness
Markedness is a specific kind of asymmetry relationship between elements of linguistic or conceptual structure. In a marked-unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one...
), genitive
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
, dative
Dative case
The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
, accusative
Accusative case
The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
, ablative
Ablative case
In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ...
, instrumental
Instrumental case
The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action...
, comitative
Comitative case
The comitative case , also known as the associative case , is a grammatical case that denotes companionship, and is used where English would use "in company with" or "together with"...
and directional
Allative case
Allative case is a type of the locative cases used in several languages. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages which do not make finer distinctions.-Finnish language:In the Finnish language, the allative is the fifth of the locative cases, with the...
. If a direct object is definite
Definiteness
In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not ....
, it must take the accusative, while it must take the nominative if it is unspecific
Specificity
Specificity may refer to:* Being specific * Specificity , the proportion of negatives in a binary classification test which are correctly identified...
. In addition to case, a number of postpositions exist that usually govern genitive, ablative, or comitative case or a form of the nominative that has sometimes -Vn either for lexical historical reasons or analogy
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
(thus maybe becoming an attributive case suffix). Noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s can take reflexive-possessive clitic
Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
s indicating that the marked noun is possessed by the subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
of the sentence: bi najz(-)aa avarsan I friend- save- 'I saved my friend'. However, there are also somewhat noun-like adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s to which case suffixes seemingly cannot be attached directly unless there is ellipsis
Ellipsis (linguistics)
In linguistics, ellipsis or elliptical construction refers to the omission from a clause of one or more words that would otherwise be required by the remaining elements.-Overview:...
. Plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
ity may be left unmarked, but there are overt plurality markers, some of which are restricted to humans. A noun that is modified by a numeral usually does not take any plural affix.
Personal pronoun
Personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
s exist for the first and second person, while the old demonstrative pronouns have come to form third person (proximal and distal) pronouns. Other word (sub-)classes include interrogative pronouns, conjunctions
Grammatical conjunction
In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...
(which take participles), spatials, and particles
Grammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
, the last being rather numerous.
Negation is mostly expressed by -güj after participles and by the negation particle biš after nouns and adjectives; negation particles preceding the verb (for example in converbal constructions) exist, but tend to be replaced by analytical constructions.
Phrase structure
The noun phraseNoun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
has the order: demonstrative pronoun/numeral
Number names
In linguistics, number names are specific words in a natural language that represent numbers.In writing, numerals are symbols also representing numbers...
, adjective, noun. Attributive sentences precede the whole NP. Titles or occupations of people, low numerals indicating groups, and focus clitics are put behind the head noun. Possessive pronoun
Possessive pronoun
A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that substitutes for a noun phrase that begins with a possessive determiner . For example, in the sentence These glasses are mine, not yours, the words mine and yours are possessive pronouns and stand for my glasses and your glasses, respectively...
s (in different forms) may either precede or follow the NP. Examples:
| bid-nij | uulz-san | ter | sajhan | zaluu-gaas | č |
| we- | meet- | that | beautiful | young.man- | |
| 'even from that beautiful young man that we have met' | |||||
| Dorž | bagš | maan |
| Dorj | teacher | our |
| 'our teacher Dorj' | ||
The verbal phrase consists of the predicate
Predicate (grammar)
There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...
in the center, preceded by its complements
Complement (linguistics)
In grammar the term complement is used with different meanings. The primary meaning is a word, phrase or clause that is necessary in a sentence to complete its meaning. We find complements that function as an argument and complements that exist within arguments.Both complements and modifiers add...
and by the adverbials modifying it and followed (mainly if the predicate is sentence-final) by modal particle
Modal particle
In linguistics, modal particles are always uninflected words, and are a type of grammatical particle. Their function is that of reflecting the mood or attitude of the speaker or narrator, in that they are not reflexive but change the mood of the verb. Languages that use a lot of modal particles in...
s, as in the following example with predicate bičsen:
| ter | hel-eh-güj-geer | üün-ijg | bič-sen | šüü |
| s/he | without:saying | it- | write- | |
| 's/he wrote it without saying [so] [i.e. without saying that s/he would do so, or that s/he had done so], I can assure you.' | ||||
In this clause the adverbial, helehgüjgeer 'without saying [so]' must precede the predicate's complement, üünijg 'it-' in order to avoid syntactic ambiguity, since helehgüjgeer is itself derived from a verb and hence an üünijg preceding it could be construed as its complement. If the adverbial was an adjective such as hurdan 'fast', it could optionally immediately precede the predicate. There are also cases in which the adverb must immediately precede the predicate.
For Khalkha, the most complete treatment of the verbal forms is Luvsanvandan (ed.) 1987. However, the analysis of predication presented here, while valid for Khalkha, is adapted from the description of Khorchin by Matsuoka 2007.
Most often, of course, the predicate consists of a verb. However, there are several types of nominal predicative constructions, with or without a copula. Auxiliaries
Coverb
In theoretical linguistics, a converb is a non-finite verb form that serves to express adverbial subordination, i.e. notions like 'when', 'because', 'after', 'while'....
that express direction and aktionsart
Aktionsart
The lexical aspect or aktionsart of a verb is a part of the way in which that verb is structured in relation to time. Any event, state, process, or action which a verb expresses—collectively, any eventuality—may also be said to have the same lexical aspect...
(among other meanings) can with the assistance of a linking converb occupy the immediate postverbal position, e.g. uuž orhison drink- leave- 'drank up'. The next position is filled by converb suffixes in connection with the auxiliary, baj- 'to be', e.g. ter güjž bajna s/he run- be- 'she is running'. Suffixes occupying this position express grammatical aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
, e.g., progressive and resultative
Resultative
A resultative is a phrase that indicates the state of a noun resulting from the completion of the verb. In the English examples below, the affected noun is shown in bold and the resulting predicate is in italics:...
. In the next position, participles followed by baj- may follow, e.g., ter irsen bajna s/he come- be- 'he has come'. Here, an explicit perfect and habituality can be marked, which is aspectual in meaning as well. This position may be occupied by multiple suffixes in a single predication, and it can still be followed by a converbal Progressive. The last position is occupied by suffixes that express tense, evidentiality, modality, and aspect.
Clauses
Unmarked phrase order is subjectSubject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
–object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
–predicate. While the predicate generally has to remain in clause-final position, the other phrases are free to change order or to wholly disappear. The topic tends to be placed clause-initially, new information rather at the end of the clause. Topic can be overtly marked with bol, which can also mark contrastive focus, overt additive focus ('even, also') can be marked with the clitic č, and overt restrictive focus with the clitic l ('only').
The inventory of voices in Mongolian consists of passive, causative
Causative
In linguistics, a causative is a form that indicates that a subject causes someone or something else to do or be something, or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event....
, reciprocal
Reciprocal (grammar)
A reciprocal is a linguistic structure that marks a particular kind of relationship between two noun phrases. In a reciprocal construction, each of the participants occupies both the role of agent and patient with respect to each other...
, plurative, and cooperative. In a passive sentence, the verb takes the suffix -gd- and the agent takes either dative or instrumental case, the first of which is more common. In the causative, the verb takes the suffix -uul-, the causee (the person caused to do something) in a transitive action (e.g., 'lift') takes dative or instrumental case, and the causee in an intransitive action (e.g., 'walk') takes accusative case. Causative morphology is also used in some passive contexts:
| Bi | tüün-d | čad-uul-san. |
| I | that.one- | fool- |
| 'I was fooled by her/him'. | ||
The semantic attribute of animacy
Animacy
Animacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun in a given taxonomic scheme is...
is syntactically important: thus the sentence, 'the bread was eaten by me', which is acceptable in English, would not be acceptable in Mongolian. The reciprocal voice is marked by -ld-, the plurative by -tsgaa-, and the cooperative by -lts-.
Mongolian allows for adjectival depictives that relate to either the subject or the direct object, e.g. Ljena nücgen untdag 'Lena sleeps naked', while adjectival resultatives are marginal.
Complex sentences
One way to conjoin clauses is to have the first clause end in a converb, as in the following example using the converb -bol:| bid | üün-ijg | ol-bol | čam-d | ög-nö |
| we | it- | find- | you.- | give- |
| 'if we find it we'll give it to you' | ||||
Some verbal nouns in the dative (or less often in the instrumental) function very similar to converbs: e.g., replacing olbol in the preceding sentence with olohod find- yields 'when we find it we'll give it to you'. Quite often, postpositions govern complete clauses. In contrast, conjunctions take verbal nouns without case:
| jadar-san | učraas | unt-laa |
| become.tired- | because | sleep- |
| 'I slept because I was tired' | ||
Finally, there is a class of particles, usually clause-initial, that are distinct from conjunctions but that also relate clauses: bi olson, harin čamd ögöhgüj I find- but you- give- 'I've found it, but I won't give it to you'.
Mongolian has a complementizer
Complementizer
In linguistics , a complementizer is a syntactic category roughly equivalent to the term subordinating conjunction in traditional grammar. For example, the word that is generally called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining...
auxiliary verb
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
ge- very similar to Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
to iu. ge- literally means 'to say' and in converbal form gež precedes either a psych verb or a verb of saying. As a verbal noun like gedeg (with n
Evidentiality
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality...
marker.
Mongolian clauses tend to be combined paratactically, which sometimes gives rise to sentence structures which are subordinative despite resembling coordinative structures in European languages:
| ter | ir-eed | namajg | üns-sen |
| that.one | come- | I. | kiss- |
| 'S/he came and kissed me.' | |||
In the subordinate clause the subject, if different from the subject of main clause, sometimes has to take accusative or genitive case. There is marginal occurrence of subjects taking ablative case as well. Subjects of attributive clauses in which the head has a function (as is the case for all English relative clause
Relative clause
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
s) usually require that if the subject is not the head
Head (linguistics)
In linguistics, the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member, or analogously the stem that determines the semantic category of a compound of which it is a component. The other elements modify the head....
, then it take the genitive, e.g. tüünij idsen hool that.one- eat- meal 'the meal that s/he had eaten'.
Loanwords and coined words
In distant times Mongolian adopted loanwordLoanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s from Old Turkic, Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
(these often through Uighur), Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
, Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, Tibetan
Tibetan language
The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
, Tungusic
Tungusic languages
The Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...
, and 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...
. Recent loanwords come from Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, and Chinese (mainly in Inner Mongolia). Language commissions of the Mongolian state have been busy translating new terminology
Terminology
Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and compound words that in specific contexts are given specific meanings, meanings that may deviate from the meaning the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language. The discipline Terminology studies among other...
into Mongolian, so that the Mongolian vocabulary now has jerönhijlögč 'president' ("generalizer") and šar ajrag 'beer' ("yellow kumys"). There are quite a few loan translations
Calque
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
, e.g. galt tereg 'train' ('fire-having cart') from Chinese huǒchē (火车, fire cart) 'train'.
Writing systems
Mongolian has been written in a variety of alphabets. The traditional Mongolian scriptMongolian script
The classical Mongolian script , also known as Uyghurjin, was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946...
was adapted from Uyghur script
Uyghur alphabet
Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, administered by China, by the Uyghur people. It is a language with a long literary tradition, and has been written using numerous writing systems through time...
probably at the very beginning of the 13th century and from that time underwent some minor disambiguations and supplementations. Between 1930 and 1932, a short-lived attempt was made to introduce the Latin script
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
in the Mongolian state, and after a preparatory phase, the Mongolian Cyrillic script was declared mandatory by government decree. It has been argued that the 1941 introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, with its smaller discrepancy between written and spoken form, contributed to the success of the large-scale government literacy
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
campaign, which increased the literacy rate from 17.3% to 73.5% between 1941 and 1950. Earlier government campaigns to eradicate illiteracy, employing the traditional script, had only managed to raise literacy from 3.0% to 17.3% between 1921 and 1940. From 1991 to 1994, an attempt at reintroducing the traditional alphabet failed in the face of popular resistance. In informal contexts of electronic text production, the use of the Latin alphabet is common.
In the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
, Mongolian is a co-official language with Mandarin Chinese
Standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
in some regions, notably the entire Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in the northern region of the country. Inner Mongolia shares an international border with the countries of Mongolia and the Russian Federation...
Autonomous Region. The traditional alphabet has always been used there, although Cyrillic was considered briefly before the Sino-Soviet split
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...
. There are two types of written Mongolian used in China: the traditional Mongolian script, which is official among Mongols nationwide, and the Clear script, used predominantly among Oirats
Oirats
Oirats are the westernmost group of the Mongols who unified several tribes origin whose ancestral home is in the Altai region of western Mongolia. Although the Oirats originated in the eastern parts of Central Asia, the most prominent group today is located in the Republic of Kalmykia, a federal...
in Xinjiang
Xinjiang
Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...
.
Linguistic history
Mongolian script
The classical Mongolian script , also known as Uyghurjin, was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946...
on stone, which is most often dated at 1224 or 1225. The Mongolian-Armenian
Armenian language
The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
wordlist of 55 words compiled by Kirakos Gandzaketsi
Kirakos Gandzaketsi
Kirakos of Gandzak was an Armenian historian of the 13th century and author of the History of Armenia, a summary of events from the 4th to the 12th century and a detailed description of the events of his own days. The work concentrates primarily on the history of Medieval Armenia and events...
(13th century) is the first written record of Mongolian words. From the 13th to the 15th centuries, Mongolian language texts were written in four scripts (not counting some vocabulary written in Western scripts): Uighur Mongolian (UM) script (an adaptation of the Uighur alphabet), Phagspa
Phagspa script
The Phags-pa script was an alphabet designed by the Tibetan Lama 'Gro-mgon Chos-rgyal 'Phags-pa for Yuan emperor Kublai Khan, as a unified script for the literary languages of the Yuan Dynasty....
(Ph) (used in decrees), Chinese
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
(SM) (The Secret History of the Mongols
The Secret History of the Mongols
The Secret History of the Mongols is the oldest surviving Mongolian-language literary work...
), and Arabic
Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
(AM) (used in dictionaries). While they are the earliest texts available, these texts have come to be called "Middle Mongolian" in scholarly practice. The documents in UM script show some distinct linguistic characteristics and are therefore often distinguished by terming their language "Preclassical Mongolian".
The next distinct period is Classical Mongolian
Classical Mongolian language
Classical Mongolian is an extinct Mongolic language formerly used in Mongolia, China, and Russia. It is a standardized written language used in a number of written texts such as the translation of the Kanjur and Tanjur and several cronicles roughly between 1700 and 1900...
, which is dated from the 17th to the 19th century. This is a written language with a high degree of standardization in orthography and syntax that sets it quite apart from the subsequent Modern Mongolian. The most notable documents in this language are the Mongolian Kanjur and Tanjur as well as several chronicles. In 1686, the Soyombo script
Soyombo script
The Soyombo script is an abugida developed by the Mongolian monk and scholar Bogdo Zanabazar in 1686 to write Mongolian.It can also be used to write Tibetan and Sanskrit....
(Buddhist texts) was created, giving distinctive evidence on early classical Mongolian phonological peculiarities.
Consonants
The research into the reconstruction of the consonants of Middle Mongolian has engendered several controversies. Middle Mongolian 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/, */kʰ/ (~ *[k], *[qʰ]) are to be reconstructed. One prominent long running disagreement concerns certain correspondences of word medial consonants among the four major scripts (UM, SM, AM, and Ph, which were discussed in the preceding section). Word medial /k/ of Uyghur Mongolian (UM) 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/ got lost in some instances, which raises the question of what the conditioning factors of those instances were. More recently, the other obvious 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/ (sometimes also called /x/) is sometimes assumed to derive from */pʰ/, which would also explain zero in SM, AM, Ph in some instances where UM indicates /p/, e.g. debelDeel (clothing)
A deel is the traditional clothing commonly worn for many centuries among the Mongols and other nomadic tribes of Central Asia, including various Turkic peoples, and can be made from cotton, silk, or brocade....
> Khalkha deel.
The palatal affricates *č, *čʰ were fronted in Northern Modern Mongolian dialects such as Khalkha. *kʰ was spirantized to /x/ in Ulaanbaatar Khalkha and the Mongolian dialects south of it, e.g. Preclassical Mongolian kündü, reconstructed as *kʰynty 'heavy', became Modern Mongolian /xunt/ (but in the vicinity of Bayankhongor
Bayankhongor
- Transportation :The Bayankhongor Airport has two runways, one of them paved, and is served by regular flights to Ulan Bator....
and Baruun-Urt
Baruun-Urt
Baruun-Urt is a town in eastern Mongolia and the capital of Sükhbaatar Province. The town with its vicinities creates a sum of Sükhbaatar Province. The Baruun-Urt sum area is 59 km², population 15,549, population density 265 per km²...
, many speakers will say [kʰunt]). Originally word-final *n turned into /ŋ/; if *n was originally followed by a vowel that later dropped, it remained unchanged, e.g. *kʰen became /xiŋ/, but *kʰoina became /xɔin/. After i-breaking, *[ʃ] became phonemic. Consonants in words containing back vowels that were followed by *i in Proto-Mongolian became palatalized
Palatalization
In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
in Modern Mongolian. In some words, word-final *n was dropped with most case forms, but still appears with the ablative, dative and genitive.
Vowels
The standard view is that Proto-Mongolic had *i, *e, *y, *ø, *u, *o, *a. According to this view, *o and *u were pharyngealized to /ɔ/ and /ʊ/, then *y and *ø were velarizedVelarization
Velarization is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant.In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of three diacritics:...
to /u/ and /o/. Thus, the vowel harmony shifted from a velar to a pharyngeal paradigm. *i in the first syllable of back-vocalic words was assimilated
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
to the following vowel; in word-initial position it became /ja/. *e was rounded to *ø when followed by *y. VhV and VjV sequences where the second vowel was any vowel but *i were monophthongized. In noninitial syllables, short vowels were deleted from the phonetic representation of the word and long vowels became short.
E.g. *imahan (*i becomes /ja/, *h disappears) → *jamaːn (unstable n drops; vowel reduction) → /jama(n)/ 'goat'
and *emys- (regressive rounding assimilation) → *ømys- (vowel velarization) → *omus- (vowel reduction) → /oms-/ 'to wear'
This reconstruction has recently been opposed, arguing that postulating a number of sound changes is not necessary if one reconstructs basically the same vowel system as Khalkha, but with *[ə] instead of *[e]. Moreover, the sound changes involved in this alternative scenario are more likely from an articulatory
Articulatory phonetics
The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures....
point of view and early Middle Mongolian loans into Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
.
Nominal system
The Secret History of the Mongols
The Secret History of the Mongols is the oldest surviving Mongolian-language literary work...
is the only document that allows the reconstruction of agreement in social gender in Middle Mongolian.]]
In the following discussion, in accordance with a preceding observation, the term "Middle Mongolian" is used merely as a cover term for texts written in any of three scripts, Uighur Mongolian script (UM), Chinese (SM), or Arabic (AM).
The case system of Middle Mongolian 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 Mongolian comitative -luγ-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
Verbal system
Middle Mongolian had a slightly larger set of declarative finite verb suffix forms and a smaller number of participles, which were less likely to be used as finite predicates. The linking converb -n became confined to stable verb combinations, while the number of converbs increased. The distinction between male, female and plural subjects exhibited by some finite verbal suffixes was lost.Changes in syntax
Neutral word order in clauses with pronominal subject changed from object–predicate–subject to subject–object–predicate, e.g.,| Kökseü | sabraq | ügü.le-run | ayyi | yeke | uge | ugu.le-d | ta | ... | kee-jüü.y |
| K. | s. | speak- | alas | big | word | speak- | you | ... | say- |
- "Kökseü sabraq spoke saying, 'Alas! You speak a great boast....' "
The syntax of verb negation shifted from negation particles preceding final verbs to a negation particle following participles; thus, as final verbs could no longer be negated, their paradigm of negation was filled by particles. For example, Preclassical Mongolian ese irebe 'did not come' vs. modern spoken Khalkha Mongolian ireegüj or irsengüj.
External links
- Monumenta Altaica grammars, texts, dictionaries and bibliographies of Mongolian and other Altaic languages
- Mongolian language courses provided by the American Center for Mongolian studies
- Lingua Mongolia information on Classical Mongolian, including an online dictionary
- GB18030 Support Package for Windows 2000/XP includes Classical Mongolian font
- Mongolian Cyrillic Character Transliteration (freeware)
Khalkha-Mongolian dictionaries
- Webster's Mongolian-English dictionary
- Mongolian-English-German-Korean-Japanese-Russian dictionary
- Mongolian bilingual dictionaries
- Bolor Mongolian-English dictionary
- Mongolian Etymological Dictionary compiled by Andras Rajki
- Monolingual dictionary based on the standard dictionary compiled by Tsevel