This is an accepted version of this page
68-754: The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in Eastern Europe , Central Asia , North Asia and East Asia , mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia . The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian , is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongol residents of Inner Mongolia , with an estimated 5.7+ million speakers. The possible precursor to Mongolic
136-474: A Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family. Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates , essentially language families consisting of
204-603: A common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European . A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although language isolates — languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families that contain one language. Inversely, there is no upper bound to the number of languages a family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages , contain over 1000. Language families can be identified from shared characteristics amongst languages. Sound changes are one of
272-474: 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' v. modern spoken Khalkha Mongolian ireegüi or irsengüi . The Mongolic languages have no convincingly established living relatives. The closest relatives of
340-524: 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
408-509: A linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic , Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family. The concept of language families
476-523: A looser fit, and wider sleeves. In Mongolia, the usage of the word deel has been extended to cover other long winter coats as well. For example, fur and leather overcoats of Western design are referred to as nekhii deel and sawkhin deel , respectively, meaning "fur deel ", "leather deel " and "cashmere deel ", which is made of the luxurious material cashmere . Nevertheless, other Mongol regions, such as Bortala in Xinjiang , retain
544-426: A number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another, even if this family's relation to other families is not known. Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for
612-427: A single language and have no single ancestor. Isolates are languages that cannot be proven to be genealogically related to any other modern language. As a corollary, every language isolate also forms its own language family — a genetic family which happens to consist of just one language. One often cited example is Basque , which forms a language family on its own; but there are many other examples outside Europe. On
680-512: A single language. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family , for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within
748-462: A single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today. An example is Basque . In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them. A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship
SECTION 10
#1732765009453816-824: 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. Neutral word order in clauses with pronominal subject changed from object–predicate–subject to subject–object–predicate; e.g. Kökseü Kökseü sabraq sabraq ügü.le-run speak- CVB ayyi alas yeke big uge word ugu.le-d speak- PAST ta you ... ... kee-jüü.y say- NFUT Kökseü sabraq ügü.le-run ayyi yeke uge ugu.le-d ta ... kee-jüü.y Kökseü sabraq speak-CVB alas big word speak-PAST you ... say-NFUT "Kökseü sabraq spoke saying, 'Alas! You speak
884-411: 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. Middle Mongol had a slightly larger set of declarative finite verb suffix forms and
952-734: Is a continuum that stretches back indefinitely in time. It is divided into Early Pre-Proto-Mongolic and Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic. Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic refers to the Mongolic spoken a few centuries before Proto-Mongolic by the Mongols and neighboring tribes like the Merkits and Keraits . Certain archaic words and features in Written Mongolian go back past Proto-Mongolic to Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic (Janhunen 2006). Pre-Proto-Mongolic has borrowed various words from Turkic languages . In
1020-487: Is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian subcontinent . Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with
1088-443: Is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree , or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy . Linguists thus describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related . The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of
1156-483: Is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language. The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods. Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take
1224-452: Is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language , spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In
1292-543: Is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects , which over time may diverge into distinct languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than familiar biological ancestry, in which species do not crossbreed. It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer . Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact , which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages . In addition,
1360-465: Is because Chuvash and Common Turkic do not differ in these features despite differing fundamentally in rhotacism-lambdacism (Janhunen 2006). Oghur tribes lived in the Mongolian borderlands before the 5th century, and provided Oghur loanwords to Early Pre-Proto-Mongolic before Common Turkic loanwords. Proto-Mongolic, the ancestor language of the modern Mongolic languages, is very close to Middle Mongol,
1428-533: Is found with any other known language. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier . For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language
SECTION 20
#17327650094531496-410: Is mostly only worn by elderly people, or on festive occasions. The deel appears similar to a caftan or an old European folded tunic . Deel s typically reach to below the wearer's knees and fan out at the bottom. They come in a variety of colors but are most commonly blue, olive, or burgundy. The deel looks like a large overcoat when not worn. Instead of buttoning together in the middle,
1564-637: Is not a measure of) a genetic relationship between the languages concerned. Linguistic interference can occur between languages that are genetically closely related, between languages that are distantly related (like English and French, which are distantly related Indo-European languages ) and between languages that have no genetic relationship. Some exceptions to the simple genetic relationship model of languages include language isolates and mixed , pidgin and creole languages . Mixed languages, pidgins and creole languages constitute special genetic types of languages. They do not descend linearly or directly from
1632-451: Is not attested by written records and so is conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing. A common visual representation of a language family is given by a genetic language tree. The tree model is sometimes termed a dendrogram or phylogeny . The family tree shows the relationship of the languages within a family, much as a family tree of an individual shows their relationship with their relatives. There are criticisms to
1700-422: Is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method , a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher . This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families . For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Indo-European
1768-598: Is the Xianbei language , heavily influenced by the Proto-Turkic (later, the Lir-Turkic ) language. The stages of historical Mongolic are: Pre-Proto-Mongolic is the name for the stage of Mongolic that precedes Proto-Mongolic. Proto-Mongolic can be clearly identified chronologically with the language spoken by the Mongols during Genghis Khan 's early expansion in the 1200-1210s. Pre-Proto-Mongolic, by contrast,
1836-465: The North Germanic language family, including Danish , Swedish , Norwegian and Icelandic , which have shared descent from Ancient Norse . Latin and ancient Norse are both attested in written records, as are many intermediate stages between those ancestral languages and their modern descendants. In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance,
1904-489: The comparative method of linguistic analysis. In order to test the hypothesis that two languages are related, the comparative method begins with the collection of pairs of words that are hypothesized to be cognates : i.e., words in related languages that are derived from the same word in the shared ancestral language. Pairs of words that have similar pronunciations and meanings in the two languages are often good candidates for hypothetical cognates. The researcher must rule out
1972-516: The Mongolic languages appear to be the para-Mongolic languages , which include the extinct Khitan , Tuyuhun , and possibly also Tuoba languages. Alexander Vovin (2007) identifies the extinct Tabγač or Tuoba language as a Mongolic language. However, Chen (2005) argues that Tuoba (Tabγač) was a Turkic language . Vovin (2018) suggests that the Rouran language of the Rouran Khaganate
2040-569: The Mongolic languages can be more economically explained starting from basically the same vowel system as Khalkha, only 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 Mongol loans into Korean . In the ensuing discourse, as noted earlier, the term "Middle Mongol" is employed broadly to encompass texts scripted in either Uighur Mongolian (UM), Chinese (SM), or Arabic (AM). The case system of Middle Mongol has remained mostly intact down to
2108-630: The Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family , since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European ; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives. In cases such as these, genetic relationships are established through use of
Mongolic languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
2176-599: The case of Early Pre-Proto-Mongolic, certain loanwords in the Mongolic languages point to early contact with Oghur (Pre-Proto-Bulgaric) Turkic, also known as r-Turkic. These loanwords precede Common Turkic (z-Turkic) loanwords and include: The above words are thought to have been borrowed from Oghur Turkic during the time of the Xiongnu . Later Turkic peoples in Mongolia all spoke forms of Common Turkic (z-Turkic) as opposed to Oghur (Bulgharic) Turkic, which withdrew to
2244-496: The common ancestor of the Germanic subfamily, was itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-European , the common ancestor of the Indo-European family. Within a large family, subfamilies can be identified through "shared innovations": members of a subfamily will share features that represent retentions from their more recent common ancestor, but were not present in the overall proto-language of the larger family. Some taxonomists restrict
2312-580: The consonants of Middle Mongol has engendered several controversies. Middle Mongol had two series of plosives, but there is disagreement as to which phonological dimension they lie on, whether aspiration or voicing. The early scripts have distinct letters for velar plosives and uvular plosives, but as these are in complementary distribution according to vowel harmony class, only two back plosive phonemes, * /k/ , * /kʰ/ (~ * [k] , * [qʰ] ) are to be reconstructed. One prominent, long-running disagreement concerns certain correspondences of word medial consonants among
2380-563: The family tree model. Critics focus mainly on the claim that the internal structure of the trees is subject to variation based on the criteria of classification. Even among those who support the family tree model, there are debates over which languages should be included in a language family. For example, within the dubious Altaic language family , there are debates over whether the Japonic and Koreanic languages should be included or not. The wave model has been proposed as an alternative to
2448-415: The family. The largest five language families in terms of number of speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Austronesian) make up five-sixths (almost 83.3%) of the world’s population. Two languages have a genetic relationship , and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor through the process of language change , or one is descended from
2516-415: The family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade . Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, sometimes referred to as "branches" or "subfamilies" of the family; for instance, the Germanic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European family. Subfamilies share a more recent common ancestor than the common ancestor of the larger family; Proto-Germanic ,
2584-495: The following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world: Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than sign languages , pidgins , and unclassifiable languages ): Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect; for example Lyle Campbell counts only 27 Otomanguean languages, although he, Ethnologue and Glottolog also disagree as to which languages belong in
2652-468: The form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic , the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as
2720-451: 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/ was lost in some instances, which raises the question of what the conditioning factors of those instances were. More recently,
2788-503: The global scale, the site Glottolog counts a total of 423 language families in the world, including 184 isolates. One controversial theory concerning the genetic relationships among languages is monogenesis , the idea that all known languages, with the exceptions of creoles , pidgins and sign languages , are descendant from a single ancestral language. If that is true, it would mean all languages (other than pidgins, creoles, and sign languages) are genetically related, but in many cases,
Mongolic languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
2856-542: The language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages ( Latin , Oscan , Umbrian , etc.) might well be " areal features ". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not
2924-511: The language of the founders of the Northern Wei dynasty, for which the surviving evidence is very sparse, and Khitan, for which evidence exists that is written in the two Khitan scripts ( large and small ) which have as yet not been fully deciphered, a direct affiliation to Mongolic can now be taken to be most likely or even demonstrated. The changes from Proto-Mongolic to Middle Mongol are described below. Research into reconstruction of
2992-580: The language spoken at the time of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire . Most features of modern Mongolic languages can thus be reconstructed from Middle Mongol. An exception would be the voice suffix like -caga- 'do together', which can be reconstructed from the modern languages but is not attested in Middle Mongol. The languages of the historical Donghu , Wuhuan , and Xianbei peoples might have been related to Proto-Mongolic. For Tabghach ,
3060-444: The latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family. A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language (not to be confused with a mother tongue ) being the root from which all languages in the family stem. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it
3128-455: The modern era. The area between the flaps and above the belt creates a large pocket in which the wearer can store objects; Mongolian men will occasionally even carry a silver bowl or cup, or even a snuff box in their deel . Though there is no major difference in material or outline between male and female deel s, women tend to wear the "pocket" closer (that is, women often prefer a more snug-fitting deel), while men's may have larger pockets,
3196-423: The oldest demonstrable language family, Afroasiatic , is far younger than language itself. Estimates of the number of language families in the world may vary widely. According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including isolates. Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists
3264-409: The other language. Deel (clothing) A deel ( Mongolian : ᠳᠡᠪᠡᠯ /дээл [deːɮ] ; Buryat : дэгэл [dɛɡɛɮ] ) is an item of traditional clothing commonly worn by Mongols and can be made from cotton , silk , wool , or brocade . The deel is still commonly worn by both men and women outside major towns, especially by herders. In urban areas, the deel
3332-692: The other possibility has been assumed; namely, that the correspondence between UM /k/ and zero in the other scripts points to a distinct phoneme, /h/ , which would correspond to the word-initial phoneme /h/ that is present in those other scripts. /h/ (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. debel > Khalkha deel . The palatal affricates * č , * čʰ were fronted in Northern Modern Mongolian dialects such as Khalkha. * kʰ
3400-454: The other. The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship . There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of
3468-438: 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 vowel developments across
SECTION 50
#17327650094533536-470: The possibility that the two words are similar merely due to chance, or due to one having borrowed the words from the other (or from a language related to the other). Chance resemblance is ruled out by the existence of large collections of pairs of words between the two languages showing similar patterns of phonetic similarity. Once coincidental similarity and borrowing have been eliminated as possible explanations for similarities in sound and meaning of words,
3604-407: The present, although important changes occurred with the comitative and the dative and most other case suffixes did undergo slight changes in form, i.e., were shortened. The Middle Mongol comitative - 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
3672-563: The proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time. One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages , including Spanish , French , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , Catalan , and many others, all of which are descended from Vulgar Latin . The Romance family itself is part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia , all believed to have descended from
3740-653: The purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgin . Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate
3808-536: The putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion). In some cases, the shared derivation of a group of related languages from a common ancestor is directly attested in the historical record. For example, this is the case for the Romance language family , wherein Spanish , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , and French are all descended from Latin, as well as for
3876-413: The relationships may be too remote to be detectable. Alternative explanations for some basic observed commonalities between languages include developmental theories, related to the biological development of the capacity for language as the child grows from newborn. A language family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all descendants of that ancestor are included in
3944-570: The remaining explanation is common origin: it is inferred that the similarities occurred due to descent from a common ancestor, and the words are actually cognates, implying the languages must be related. When languages are in contact with one another , either of them may influence the other through linguistic interference such as borrowing. For example, French has influenced English , Arabic has influenced Persian , Sanskrit has influenced Tamil , and Chinese has influenced Japanese in this way. However, such influence does not constitute (and
4012-443: The sides are pulled against the wearer's body, the right flap close to the body with the left covering. On the right side of the wearer are typically 5 or 6 clasps to hold the top flap in place. There is one clasp below the armpit, three at the shoulder, and either one or two at the neckline. A deel is traditionally worn with a large sash, usually made of silk or leather belts with large, ornate buckles have become more common in
4080-494: The specific meaning of the word deel as the traditional garment, and refer to other overcoats as olondoi . Deel design varies to a certain degree among cultures and ethnic groups, and has varied across time periods. There are even distinct variations among different Mongol tribes, mostly on the design of the upper chest opening edges. For instance, the Khalkha Mongol deel opening edges are round, while
4148-768: The strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through the comparative method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change through language contact which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example, the Mongolic , Tungusic , and Turkic languages share a great deal of similarities that lead several scholars to believe they were related . These supposed relationships were later discovered to be derived through language contact and thus they are not truly related. Eventually though, high amounts of language contact and inconsistent changes will render it essentially impossible to derive any more relationships; even
SECTION 60
#17327650094534216-426: The term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus on how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups , and groups into complexes . A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock . The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there
4284-502: The tree model. The wave model uses isoglosses to group language varieties; unlike in the tree model, these groups can overlap. While the tree model implies a lack of contact between languages after derivation from an ancestral form, the wave model emphasizes the relationship between languages that remain in contact, which is more realistic. Historical glottometry is an application of the wave model, meant to identify and evaluate genetic relations in linguistic linkages . A sprachbund
4352-400: 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
4420-533: The west in the 4th century. The Chuvash language , spoken by 1 million people in European Russia, is the only living representative of Oghur Turkic which split from Proto Turkic around the 1st century AD. Words in Mongolic like dayir (brown, Common Turkic yagiz ) and nidurga (fist, Common Turkic yudruk ) with initial *d and *n versus Common Turkic *y are sufficiently archaic to indicate loans from an earlier stage of Oghur (Pre-Proto-Bulgaric). This
4488-894: 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
4556-404: Was a Mongolic language, close but not identical to Middle Mongolian. A few linguists have grouped Mongolic with Turkic , Tungusic and possibly Koreanic or Japonic as part of the controversial Altaic family . Language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family
4624-410: Was dropped with most case forms, but still appears with the ablative, dative and genitive. Only foreign origin words start with the letter L and none start with the letter R . 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 velarized to /u/ and /o/ . Thus,
#452547