Courses: Department of Central Eurasian Studies

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Mongolian Languages and Dialects
Catalog Number CEUS-U 568
György Kara

The course investigates the following topics:

The agglutinative type. Definition of language and dialect. Classification models.
The periods of Mongol language history: Proto-Mongol, Ancient Mongol, Middle Mongol and New Mongol. The main sources. Evaluation of the monuments in various scripts (Uygur, Square Script, Clear Script, Arabic, Chinese, Tibetan, Manchu, Cyrillic, Latin, etc.).
Tabgach and other Xianbi/Shiwei glosses in Chinese transcription. The language of the Kitans in the two Kitan scripts as well in Chinese transcription.
The family of living Mongol languages: Oirat including Kalmyk, Buriat (West, East, Barga), Khalkha, Chahar, Ordos, Baarin, Khorchin, Kamnigan; the "peripheral," isolated or border languages: Daur, Monghul and Manghuer, Santa/Dongxiang, Bao’an, Kangjia, Yugur, Moghol; their territorial distribution and characteristics.
Phonetic history. Reconstruction of the earlier systems of phonemes. Inner and outer sources. Regular and irregular changes. Relative chronology.
The vowel system. Horizontal and vertical vowel harmony. Regressive and progressive assimilation, dissimilation, reduction, elision, etc. The merger of the back with the front i. Diphthongs and long vowels, their origin and development.
The consonantal system. Phonotactics. The aspirated/unaspirated correlation. History of the bilabial voiceless stop. Fricativization. Nasalization. Palatalization. Pharyngealization. The "Ordos law." Phoneme split. Allophones becoming phonemes. Metathesis of distinctive features. Distinctive features becoming phonemes.
Elements of historical morphology. The system of the personal pronouns. The n-stems. Possessive suffixes of nouns, personal suffixes of verbs in Oirat and Buriat. Changes of the system of verbal moods, aspects and tenses. Suffixes marking the natural gender. Syntactic marker from word formation suffix. Changes in the usage of the plural; plural forms becoming singular. Fusion, contraction.
Changes in the syntax. Binomial verbal and nominal compounds. Negation. Interrogation. Word order.
A short history of the lexicon. Semantical changes. The Turkic, Tungusic, Tibetan, Chinese, Russian and other elements of the Mongol languages.

Recommended tools: J. Janhunen, ed., The Mongolic Languages (London 2003); N. Poppe, Introduction to Altaic Linguistics (Wiesbaden 1965); id., Introduction to Mongolian Comparative Studies (Helsinki 1955); Sun Zhu et al., Menggu yuzu yuyan cidian (Xining 19); D. Tömörtogoo, Mongol xelnii tüüxen xeljüi I (Ulaanbaatar 1992); B. Vladimircov, Sravnitel’naja grammatika mongol’skogo pis’mennogo jazyka i chalchaskogo nareèija (Leningrad 1929).