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46-400: In all three countries, Oirat has become variously endangered or even obsolescent as a direct result of government actions or as a consequence of social and economic policies. Its most widespread tribal dialect, which is spoken in all of these nations, is Torgut . The term Oirat or more precisely, Written Oirat is sometimes also used to refer to the language of historical documents written in

92-440: A Cyrillic-based script system has been implemented. It does not represent epenthetic vowels , and thus doesn't show syllabification. In Mongolia, Central Mongolian minority varieties have no status, so Oirats are supposed to use Mongolian Cyrillic which de facto only represents Khalkha Mongolian . Torgut Oirat Torgut ( Oirat : Торһд , romanized:  Torhd , [torˈɣət] ), also spelled Torghud ,

138-517: A modal particle . Else, the formal inventory is what would be expected from a Mongolian variety, though it is not clear to what degree the functions are the same. Kalmyk language [REDACTED]   Kyrgyzstan Kalmyk Oirat (Kalmyk: Хальмг Өөрдин келн , Haľmg Öördin keln , IPA: [xalʲˈmək øːrˈdin keˈlən] ), commonly known as the Kalmyk language (Kalmyk: Хальмг келн , Haľmg keln , IPA: [xalʲˈmək keˈlən] ),

184-792: A conference held in Moscow, scientists of the Mongolian group of peoples decided to change the phonetic meaning of the two letters of the Kalmyk script, as well as change the alphabetical order of the letters. In May of the same year, the III Kalmyk Regional Conference on Language and Writing, which was held in Elista , confirmed this decision. The alphabet took the following form: The letter Ь ь , unlike most other Soviet Latinized alphabets, denoted palatalization. In this form,

230-406: A phrase: келҗ бәәнә /kelʲd͡ʑə bæːnæ/ > [kelʲd͡ʑ βæːnæ] "to speak- CV.IPEF to be- prs ". The labial approximant or fricative /w/ can be pronounced as: Word-initial syllable structure is (C)V(C), meaning that in native words no word-initial clusters can occur. For non-initial syllables, however, a syllable-initial cluster of up to four consonants is allowed, meaning the maximal syllable

276-658: A small stroke on the right to indicate vowel length. It was retained longest in China where it can still be found in an occasional journal article. However, in China, Buryat and Oirat are considered non-standard compared to Southern Mongolian and are therefore supposed to use the Mongolian script and Southern Mongolian grammar for writing. In practice the people use neither and resort to learning Mandarin Chinese and using hànzì to communicate with others in China. In Kalmykia,

322-526: A vowel, either (1) a prothetic /g/ or /ʁ/ is added or (2) a vowel is deleted from the case ending. This is further demonstrated in the table below. The literary tradition of Oirat reaches back to 11th century when the Old Uyghur script was used. The official Kalmyk alphabet, named Clear Script or Todo bichig in Oirat, was created in the 17th century by a Kalmyk Buddhist monk called Zaya Pandita . Like

368-500: A word consists of three syllables, second of which has a vowel /a/ or /æ/, and third syllable has a reduced vowel /ə/. Examples include гөрәсн [gøræːsᵊn] " saiga ", туршарт [turʃaːrtə] "during", кезәңк [kezæːŋkə] "a while ago", һазрас [ɢazraːsə] "land- ABL ". The following is an outline of the consonant system of Kalmyk. Note that since virtually all speakers of Kalmyk are bilingual , recent borrowings from Russian do not undergo phonological adaptation and are pronounced according to

414-438: Is endangered in all areas where it is spoken. In Russia, the killing of a large fraction of the Kalmyk population and the destruction of their society as consequences of the Kalmyk deportations of 1943 , along with the subsequent imposition among them of Russian as the sole official language have rendered the language obsolescent: it is almost exclusively the elderly who have a fluent command of Kalmyk. In China, while Oirat

460-444: Is nam- ~ nan- , next to the standard Mongolian first person plural there is also a variant in ma- , namely madan , madnu:s (both nominative ), and the third person singular accusative is peculiar in that it is based on the regular stem yy/n- (proximal, distal is tyy/n- ), thus inflecting as yyg compared to Written Mongolian ⟨egün-i⟩ , Standard Khalkha ⟨üünijg⟩ . The old voluntative -su: ~ -s

506-665: Is CCCCVC. In some consonant clusters such as /tl tn dn dl/ a sonorant becomes syllabic . These clusters are also nasally released . The reduced vowel /ə/ is regularly preserved and can be a syllable nucleus in the following cases: On the other hand, the vowel /ə/ cannot form syllables on its own if the following is true: Two-syllable words with schwa as a nucleus of the second syllable may undergo metathesis , thus creating an open syllable : Written Oirat oros "Russian" > /orəs/ > /orsə/; ulus "country, people" > /uləs/ > /ulsə/; oyirad "Oirat" > /øːrət/ > /øːrdə/. Kalmyk exhibits non-phonemic stress with

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552-827: Is a variety of the Mongolian language , natively spoken by the Kalmyk people of Kalmykia , a federal subject of Russia . In Russia, it is the standard form of the Oirat Mongolian (based on the Torgut dialect ), which belongs to the Mongolic language family . The Kalmyk people of the Northwest Caspian Sea of Russia claim descent from the Oirats from Eurasia , who have also historically settled in Mongolia and Northwest China . According to UNESCO ,

598-844: Is a dialect of the Oirat language spoken in Xinjiang , in western Mongolia and in eastern Kalmykia (where it was the basis for Kalmyk , the literary standard language of that region ). Thus, it has more speakers than any other variety of Oirat. It is better researched than any other Oirat variety spoken in China. The Torgut dialect is spoken in Russia in Eastern Kalmykia, in Bulgan sum in Khovd Province in Mongolia and in

644-403: Is frequent usage of future participle as a predicate of a sentence to express future tense . There is little to none suppletion (irregular forms) in verbal inflection and noun conjugation Traditionally, Kalmyk cases are said to have three declensions; however, this is mostly due to orthographical peculiarities. Basically, if the word ends in a full vowel and the case ending begins in

690-535: Is normal Oirat, but -sud seems to be somewhat peculiar. The case system is standard Oirat which differs from Mongolian in lacking an allative and retaining the old comitative case, that is, it is rather conservative. In contrast to Middle Mongolian and Southern Mongolian and in agreement with Khalkha , the accusative case always has -g , not -i . The reflexive-possessive retains -n , thus -aan . The pronominal forms are not substantially different from Khalkha. The first person singular pronoun stem

736-475: Is retained in Oirat, while the new voluntative -ja (at least in Xinjiang Torgut) rather tends to indicate a plural subject . Like in all Oirat varieties, the converb -xla: is quite common. As is common to all Oirat dialects except for Alasha , participles and finite verbal suffixes can inflect for first and second person and for number ; in case it is present, these inflections follow

782-556: Is still quite widely used in its traditional ranges and there are many monolingual speakers, a combination of government policies and social realities has created an environment deleterious to the use of this language: the Chinese authorities' adoption of Southern Mongolian as the normative Mongolian language, new educational policies which have led to the virtual elimination of Mongolian schools in Xinjiang (there were just two left as of 2009), policies aiming to curtail nomadism , and

828-773: Is very close to the Oirat dialects found in Mongolia and the People's Republic of China, both phonologically and morphologically . The differences in dialects, however, concern the vocabulary, as the Kalmyk language has been influenced by and has adopted words from the Russian language and various Turkic languages . Two important features that characterise Kalmyk are agglutination and vowel harmony . In an agglutinative language , words are formed by adding affixes to existing words , called stem words or root words. Prefixes , however, are not common in Mongolic. Vowel harmony refers to

874-541: The Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang, mainly in three separate areas in its north-western part. Sečenbaγatur et al. give an exhaustive list of the areas of Xinjiang where Oirat (in many cases Torgut) is spoken that also includes some places in north-eastern Xinjiang: the autonomous prefectures of Bayangol and Bortala , the counties Hoboksar and Dörbiljin and the city of Wusu in Tacheng Prefecture ,

920-689: The Clear script . In Mongolia, there are seven historical Oirat dialects, each corresponding to a different tribe: There are some varieties of Oirat that are difficult to classify. The Alasha dialect in Alxa League , Inner Mongolia , originally belonged to Oirat and has been classified as such by some because of its phonology . However, it has been classified by others as Mongolian proper because of its morphology . The Darkhad dialect in Mongolia's Khövsgöl Province has variously been classified as Oirat, Mongolian proper, or (less often) Buryat . Oirat

966-1173: The voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ can appear in both front and back vowel words, e.g. һәәвһә /ɣæːwɣæ/ "good" and һалун /ɣalun/ "goose". Nonetheless, all consonants and neutral reduced vowel /ə/ are influenced by harmonic status of a word, at least phonetically. The harmonic vowel pairs are: /a/~/æ/, /o/~/ø/, /u/~/y/, [ i ] ~ [ ɨ ] , the last pair being allophonic . Historical long vowels in non-initial syllables have been reduced to short vowels , while historical short vowels have been reduced to schwa and then, just like in Mongolian , were replaced according to language's phonotactics . For example, Written Oirat ɣarān "hand- P.REFL " became һаран /ɣaran/; ɣarɣaqsan "to get out- CAUS - PC.PST " became һарһсн /ɣarɣsən/. Long vowels and diphthongs in one-syllable words have been also reduced to short vowels: sayin "good" > сән /sæn/. Nevertheless, in inflected forms of such words, short vowels tend to become elongated: сән /sæn/ "good" > сәәг /sæːgə/ "good- ACC ", күн /kyn/ "man"> күүнә /kyːnæ/ "man- GEN ". Despite that, long vowels still may be pronounced in non-initial syllables. This happens if

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1012-589: The Nazis . Significant factors contributing to its demise include: (1) the deaths of a substantial percentage of the Kalmyk population from disease and malnutrition, both during their travel and upon their arrival to remote exile settlements in Central Asia , south central Siberia and the Soviet Far East ; (2) the wide dispersal of the Kalmyk population; (3) the duration of exile, which ended in 1957; (4)

1058-461: The Oirat literary tradition. The modern Cyrillic alphabet used for the Kalmyk language is as follows: Since the Tatar alphabet is identical to the Kalmyk alphabet (both featuring the same additional letters to the Russian one), Kalmyks using Windows use Tatar keyboard layouts to type Kalmyk. Kalmyk-specific keyboard layouts, however, are available on Android and Linux systems. * Pronounced /je/ at

1104-660: The Old Mongolian script, Todo bichig was written from top to bottom. Written Oirat language contained many words borrowed from the Mongolian language and not used in everyday speech, despite many attempts to bring the written standard and colloquial spoken language closer together. Thus, already at the beginning of the 18th century, two written forms of the Kalmyk language were recorded - “bookish”, used in religious practice and having numerous Mongolian and Tibetan borrowings and preserving archaic language forms, as well as “conversational”, used in private correspondence and reflecting

1150-642: The Orthodox Missionary Society published a number of school books in the Kalmyk language, using Cyrillic script. The first edition of this kind was the "Primer for Kalmyk ulus schools" (1892). The alphabet used in this primer has the following composition: А а, Б б, В в, Г г, Д д, Е е, З з, И и, К к, Л л, М м, Н н, О о, П п, Р р, С с, Т т, У у, Х х, Ц ц, Ч ч, Ш ш, ь, Э э, Ю ю, Я я, Ӓ ӓ , Ā ā , Ǟ ǟ , Ӧ ӧ , Ō ō , Ȫ ȫ , Ӱ ӱ , Ӯ ӯ , Ӱ̄ ӱ̄ , Д ж д ж , Нг нг, І й, і й, Йе йе, Йӧ йӧ, Ӓй ӓй, Ӣ ӣ , Э̄ э̄, Ю̄ ю̄, Я̄ я̄ . In 1902,

1196-546: The Republic. During the period of Perestroika , Kalmyk linguists, in collaboration with the Kalmyk government, planned and tried to implement the revival of the Kalmyk language. This revival was seen as an integral part of the reassertion of Kalmyk culture. In an important symbolic gesture, the Kalmyk language was declared an official language of the Republic, giving it equal status with the Russian language with respect to official governmental use and language education. During

1242-618: The Torgut, but also on the Derbet dialect. Sometimes in the editions of that time, the letter ң was replaced by ҥ or н̈ , and the letters Е е, Ж ж, Ф Ф, Щ щ were not officially included in the alphabet. September 7, 1926 at a meeting at the Kalmyk pedagogical school in Astrakhan, it was decided to make changes to the alphabet. So, all additional letters were canceled, and instead of them entered D d, V v, H h . In June 1927, this alphabet

1288-591: The US, but the use of Kalmyk is in steep decline. In all three locations, the actual number of speakers is unknown. Kalmyk is an endangered language. As of 2012, the Kalmyk community in New Jersey , which arrived in the US in the 1950s, was planning to work with the Enduring Voices project to promote Kalmyk language and culture. From a synchronic perspective, Kalmyk is the most prominent variety of Oirat. It

1334-703: The agreement between the vowels in the root of a word and the vowels in the word's suffix or suffixes. Other features include the absence of grammatical gender . It has some elements in common with the Uralic and Uyghur languages, which reflects its origin from the common language of the Oirats, a union of four Oirat tribes that absorbed some Ugric and Turkic tribes during their expansion westward. Similar to Middle Mongol and Written Oirat , Kalmyk exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony . Unlike Middle Mongol , however, consonants are not restricted by harmony . For instance,

1380-679: The alphabet existed until 1938. There is no romanization standard for Kalmyk, but a modified version of either the BGN/PCGN romanization of Russian or the Common Turkic Alphabet is used in practice. In the second half of the 1930s, the USSR began the process of translating scripts into Cyrillic. The Latin script was in turn replaced by another Cyrillic script in 1938. Initially, the Kalmyk Cyrillic alphabet included all

1426-520: The changes taking place in the language . Todo bichig, also called “zayapandit script” after its creator, existed among the Kalmyks until 1924 with minor changes. Oirats of China use it to the present. In 1924 this script was replaced by an adaptation of the Cyrillic script , which was abandoned in 1930 in favour of a Latin script . At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries,

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1472-466: The counties Küriye, Tekes and Nilka in the Ili Prefecture , the prefectures Altay , Hamil and Changji and Xinjiang's capital city, Ürümqi . To some degree, this distribution can be associated with the history of the Torgut tribe, one of the four crucial members of the clan federation "Dörben Oirat ". Torgut has the vowel phonemes that may be short or long . When appearing in

1518-399: The first syllable of a word, these vowels determine the vowel harmony class, e.g. Written Mongolian talbiγun , Khalkha-Mongolian . /i/ , /iː/ , and /æː/ in a non-initial syllable are neutral vowels. /oː/, /ɵː/ and /eː/ never appear in any but the first syllable of a word. /ɢ/ can also have an allophone of [ɣ]. Most of the plural forms of Torgut are common Mongolian, -mu:d

1564-503: The language is "definitely endangered". According to the Russian census of 2021, there are 110,000 speakers out of an ethnic population consisting of 178,000 people. Kalmyk is now only spoken as a native language by a small minority of the Kalmyk population. Its decline as a living language began after the Kalmyk people were deported en masse from their homeland in December 1943, as punishment for limited Kalmyk collaboration with

1610-523: The last syllable (even if it ends in schwa ) being stressed. Like other Mongolic languages , Kalmyk is an agglutinative , suffixing, and a genderless language. Some aspects of its syntax have been influenced by Russian ; for example, relative clauses , traditionally characterized by left-branching and employing a converbial form of a verb (similarly to Japanese ), now often use Russian relative pronoun который and thus exhibit right-branching. Other noticeable feature possibly influenced by Russian

1656-406: The letters of the Russian alphabet, as well as Ä ä, Гъ гъ, Дж дж, Нъ нъ, Ö ö, Ӱ ӱ . In 1941, the alphabet was reformed again - the outline of additional letters was changed. However, due to the deportation of the Kalmyks that followed soon, the transition to a new version of the alphabet was carried out only after their rehabilitation - in the late 1950s. These script reforms effectively disrupted

1702-560: The limited occupational prospects in Chinese society for graduates of Mongolian schools. As for Mongolia, the predominance of Khalkha Mongolian is bringing about the Khalkhaization of all other varieties of Mongolian. Oirat has been written in two script systems: the Mongolian scripts and Cyrillic. Historically, the Clear script , which originated from the Mongolian script , was used. It uses modified letters shapes e.g. to differentiate between different rounded vowels, and it uses

1748-407: The long vowels was supposed to put a line (macron), but in practice this was not done. Also, despite the absence of an approved project, the letter ъ was used to designate unclear vowels. From January 1926, the newspaper «Ulan Halmg» ( ru ) began to be printed on this alphabet. The basis of the emerging Kalmyk literary language was the Torgut dialect, but later the norm began to focus not only on

1794-531: The majority of the votes had declared obsolete writing - it was noted that it was difficult for writing and learning, lack of fonts, the inability to use on the telegraph, and so on. In this regard, it was decided to translate Kalmyk language into Cyrillic script. On January 12, the alphabet was adopted, consisting of the following letters: А а, Б б, В в, Г г, Д д, Е е, Ж ж, З з, И и, К к, Л л, М м, Н н, О о, П п, Р р, С с, Т т, У у, Ф ф, Х х, Ц ц, Ч ч, Ш ш, Щ щ, Ы ы, Э э, Ю ю, Я я, Ь ь, Й й, ä , ö , ӱ , ң , ӝ . Above

1840-575: The production of the film Return of the Jedi , sound designer Rafe Mercieca—with his life-time partner Ben Curtis—based the language of the Ewoks on Kalmyk after hearing it spoken in a documentary and being impressed with its phonology. The majority of Kalmyk language speakers live in the Republic of Kalmykia, where it is an official language. A small group of Kalmyk language speakers also live in France and

1886-529: The rules of Russian phonology , including those of vowel reduction and stress . Orthographic voiced stops d, g are devoiced: келәд /kelæt/ "to speak- CV.ANT ", бөлг /bølək/ "chapter". Devoicing also occurs whenever there is a two-consonant cluster with one consonant being voiceless : /bolʃko/ "may not", таңһч /taŋxt͡ɕə/ "republic". Consonant clusters exhibit other types of assimilation: The voiced bilabial stop /b/, being only restricted to word-initial position, may be pronounced as [ β ] in

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1932-659: The stigma associated with being accused of treason, and (5) assimilation into the larger, more dominant culture. Collectively, these factors discontinued the intergenerational language transmission. In 1957, the Soviet government reinstated the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast and later reestablished the Autonomous Republic of Kalmykia . The Kalmyk people were permitted to return to the Republic in 1957, 14 years after exile. The Russian language , however,

1978-437: The “Primer for Kalmyks” was released, where a different version of the alphabet was used: А а, Б б, Г г, Д д, З з, И и, Й й, К к, Л л, М м, Н н, О о, Р р, С с, Т т, У у, Х х, Ц ц, Ч ч, Ш ш, ь, Э э, Ӓ ӓ, Ā ā, Ǟ ǟ, Ӧ ӧ, Ō ō, Ȫ ȫ, Ӱ ӱ, Ӯ ӯ, Ӱ̄ ӱ̄, Дж дж, Ҥ ҥ, Ӣ ӣ, Э̄ э̄ . At the same time, the letter of the clear script continued to be used. On January 6, 1924, a meeting of the Kalmyk public was held in Astrakhan. At this meeting,

2024-427: Was introduced into official use, but much of the literature and press was still published in the alphabet of 1924. On February 5–8, 1928, a regular meeting on Kalmyk writing was held, at which the alphabet was reformed again. The letters D d, V v, H h were canceled, and the letter Ә ә was entered to indicate unclear vowels. It was decided to denote the long vowels by doubling the corresponding letters. This alphabet

2070-424: Was made the official language of the Republic, and Sovietisation was imposed on the Kalmyk people, leading to drastic cuts in Kalmyk language education. The Cyrillic alphabet became firmly established among the Kalmyks (and other peoples, too). For instance, books, periodicals, newspapers, etc., were published using it. By the late 1970s, the Russian language became the primary language of instruction in all schools in

2116-718: Was used until 1930. In the late 1920s, the process of romanization of writing began in the USSR. In the course of this process in January 1930, the IX Kalmyk Regional Congress of Soviets legalized the new Latinized alphabet of the Kalmyk language. Its actual use began in newspapers from the end of September of the same year. In this alphabet, the letters were arranged in the following order: A a, B b, C c, Ç ç, D d, E e, Ә ә, G g, H h, I i, j, K k, L l, M m, N n, ꞑ, O o, Ө ө, P p, R r, S s, Ş ş, F f, Y y, Z z, Ƶ ƶ, U u, T t, V v, X x, ь . On January 10–17, 1931, at

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