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64-535: Middle Mongol or Middle Mongolian was a Mongolic koiné language spoken in the Mongol Empire . Originating from Genghis Khan 's home region of Northeastern Mongolia , it diversified into several Mongolic languages after the collapse of the empire. In comparison to Modern Mongolian , it is known to have had no long vowels , different vowel harmony and verbal systems and a slightly different case system. Middle Mongolian closely resembles Proto-Mongolic ,

128-726: 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

192-694: A passive construction that is peculiar to it and maybe Buryat as well, but is not present in the other dialects or in the other Mongolic languages. While it might also have fulfilled the function to foreground the patient , it usually seems to mark actions which either affect the subject directly or indirectly affect it in a harmful way. belgütei Belgütei teyin so čabčiqdaju chop- PASS - CVB - IMPERF bö’et be- CVB - PRF belgütei teyin čabčiqdaju bö’et Belgütei so chop-PASS-CVB-IMPERF be-CVB-PRF ‘Belgütei, having been chopped in that manner’ ke’üt son- PL minu Mongolic languages The Mongolic languages are

256-419: A syllable : The most sonorous part of the syllable (that is, the part that is easiest to sing ), called the syllabic peak or nucleus , is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins (called the onset and coda ) are typically consonants. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC, where C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. This can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of

320-559: A combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop" [t] . In this case, the airstream mechanism is omitted. Some pairs of consonants like p::b , t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis , but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction. Consonants are scheduled by their features in a number of IPA charts: Symbols to the right in a cell are voiced , to the left are voiceless . Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible. The recently extinct Ubykh language had only 2 or 3 vowels but 84 consonants;

384-544: A consonant that is very similar. For instance, an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical *k has become palatalized in many languages, so that Saanich for example has /tʃ/ and /kʷ/ but no plain /k/ ; similarly, historical *k in the Northwest Caucasian languages became palatalized to /kʲ/ in extinct Ubykh and to /tʃ/ in most Circassian dialects. Symbols to

448-453: A copula. They are listed in the following table. ‑gcid Converbs are used as modifiers of the finite verb and their subject is normally the same as that of the finite verb. The following types occur: (-basu) When combined with the particle -ber , it has concessive function 'even if / although he does X'. The voice morphology can be viewed as part of word formation. The following suffixes may be mentioned: Middle Mongol exhibits

512-438: A form in -n . There are a number of forms expressing wishes and commands, as shown in the following table. A polite request can also be expressed by a future passive participle form -qda-qu (see below). There are a number of participles. They may be used attributively or as standalone heads of nominal phrases, and several may also be combined with a copula to form complex verbal forms, or simply be used predicatively without

576-476: 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

640-527: 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

704-461: A noun declined for any case. Its shape varies depending on phonological factors and the genitive ending of vowel stems is also changed in front of it: The personal pronouns exhibit an inclusive-exclusive distinction . They mostly take the same case suffixes as the nouns, but display some suppletion and stem allomorphy, as summarised below: Other pronouns and related forms are: (pl. -n ) (pl. -n ) Indefinite pronouns are formed by combining

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768-548: A positionally determined allophonic variation [k]~[ q ], [g]~[ ɢ ], with the postvelar allophones occurring in back-vowel contexts. Both have been claimed to occur before /i/ (depending on its origin from Proto-Mongolic */i/ or */ ɯ /), which would make them phonemic. In transliteration , /ø/ and /y/ are commonly indicated as ⟨ö⟩ and ⟨ü⟩ , respectively; /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/ and /ʃ/ are written ⟨c⟩ (or ⟨č⟩ ), ⟨j⟩ and ⟨sh⟩ (or ⟨š⟩ ); /j/

832-536: A revision of this terminology for the early period of Mongolian has been attempted, the lack of a thorough and linguistically-based periodization of Mongolian up to now has constituted a problem for any such attempts. The related term "Preclassical Mongolian" is applied to Middle Mongol documents in Mongolian script, since these show some distinct linguistic peculiarities. Middle Mongol had the consonant phonemes /p, m, tʰ, t, s, n, l, r, t͡ʃʰ, t͡ʃ, j, kʰ, k, h/ and

896-828: 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

960-417: 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

1024-401: A vowel. The word consonant may be used ambiguously for both speech sounds and the letters of the alphabet used to write them. In English, these letters are B , C , D , F , G , J , K , L , M , N , P , Q , S , T , V , X , Z and often H , R , W , Y . In English orthography , the letters H, R, W, Y and the digraph GH are used for both consonants and vowels. For instance,

1088-474: A vowel. He divides them into two subcategories: hēmíphōna ( ἡμίφωνα 'half-sounded'), which are the continuants , and áphōna ( ἄφωνος 'unsounded'), which correspond to plosives . This description does not apply to some languages, such as the Salishan languages , in which plosives may occur without vowels (see Nuxalk ), and the modern concept of "consonant" does not require co-occurrence with

1152-431: Is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the [j] in [ˈjɛs] yes and [ˈjiʲld] yield and the [w] of [ˈwuʷd] wooed having more constriction and a more definite place of articulation than the [ɪ] in [ˈbɔɪ̯l] boil or [ˈbɪt] bit or the [ʊ] of [ˈfʊt] foot . The other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying

1216-734: 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

1280-409: 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,

1344-469: Is denoted by ⟨y⟩ ; /ŋ/ is spelt ⟨ng⟩ ; and /ɢ/ may be expressed by ⟨gh⟩ (or ⟨γ⟩ ). The vowels participate in front-back vowel harmony , where /a/, /o/ and /u/ alternate with /e/, /ø/ and /y/; in the rest of this article, morphemes are represented only by their back-vocalic allomorph. The vowel /i/ is neutral with respect to vowel harmony. Certain stems end in an 'unstable /n/' (here marked n ), which

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1408-479: Is due to language contact. There are nine cases , the nominative being unmarked. The verbal suffixes can be divided into finite suffixes, participles and converbal suffixes. Some of the finite suffixes inflect for subject number and gender. Adjectives precede their modificatum and agree with it in number. The pronouns have a clusivity distinction. The plural suffixes are distributed as follows: The case endings have different allomorphs depending on whether

1472-570: Is less common in non-rhotic accents.) The most frequent consonant in many other languages is /p/ . The most universal consonants around the world (that is, the ones appearing in nearly all languages) are the three voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , and the two nasals /m/ , /n/ . However, even these common five are not completely universal. Several languages in the vicinity of the Sahara Desert , including Arabic , lack /p/ . Several languages of North America, such as Mohawk , lack both of

1536-532: Is not definite and specific; in such cases, stems ending in unstable /n/ lose it. The comitative may also be used as an instrumental. The ablative expresses the object of a comparison in a construction expressing the comparative degree: qola-ca qola 'farther than far', lit. 'far from far'. The genitive does the same in the superlative degree construction: irgen-ü sayin haran 'the best of the people', lit. 'people good of people'. A reflexive possessive suffix (meaning 'his own', 'my own' and so on) can be placed after

1600-426: Is obligatorily or optionally dropped in front of various suffixes. The consonants /g/ and /k/ are elided in front of vowel-initial suffixes. Middle Mongol is an agglutinating language that makes nearly exclusive use of suffixes . The word order is subject–object–predicate if the subject is a noun and also object–predicate–subject if it is a pronoun . Middle Mongol rather freely allows for predicate–object, which

1664-598: 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,

1728-418: Is unlikely that the stele was erected at the place where it was found in the year of the event it describes, suggesting that it is more likely to have been erected about a quarter of a century later, when Yisüngge had gained more substantial political power. If so, the earliest surviving Mongolian monument would be an edict of Töregene Khatun of 1240 and the oldest surviving text arguably The Secret History of

1792-579: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like ⟨ch⟩ , ⟨sh⟩ , ⟨th⟩ , and ⟨ng⟩ are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example,

1856-521: The Khitan language into the "Para-Mongolic" family, meaning it is related to the Mongolic languages as a sister group , rather than as a direct descendant of Proto-Mongolic. Alexander Vovin has also identified several possible loanwords from Koreanic languages into Khitan. He also identified the extinct Tuyuhun language as another Para-Mongolic language. The temporal delimitation of Middle Mongol causes some problems as shown in definitions ranging from

1920-517: The Taa language has 87 consonants under one analysis , 164 under another , plus some 30 vowels and tone. The types of consonants used in various languages are by no means universal. For instance, nearly all Australian languages lack fricatives; a large percentage of the world's languages lack voiced stops such as /b/ , /d/ , /ɡ/ as phonemes, though they may appear phonetically. Most languages, however, do include one or more fricatives, with /s/ being

1984-405: The vowel phonemes /i, e, y, ø, a, u, o/ . The main difference to older approaches is that ⟨γ⟩ is identified with /h/ and /ɡ/ (sometimes as [p] before /u/ and /y/ ), so that *pʰ for Proto-Mongolic cannot be reconstructed from internal evidence that used to be based solely on word-initial /h/ and the then rather incomplete data from Monguor . There appears to have been

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2048-420: The 13th until the early 15th or until the late 16th century. This discrepancy arises from the lack of documents written in the Mongolian language from between the early 15th and late 16th centuries. It is not clear whether these two delimitations constitute conscious decisions about the classification of e.g. a small text from 1453 with less than 120 words or whether the vaster definition is just intended to fill up

2112-426: The 80-odd consonants of Ubykh , it lacks the plain velar /k/ in native words, as do the related Adyghe and Kabardian languages. But with a few striking exceptions, such as Xavante and Tahitian —which have no dorsal consonants whatsoever—nearly all other languages have at least one velar consonant: most of the few languages that do not have a simple /k/ (that is, a sound that is generally pronounced [k] ) have

2176-574: The Congo , and China , including Mandarin Chinese . In Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/ , and spelled that way in Pinyin . Ladefoged and Maddieson call these "fricative vowels" and say that "they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels". That is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow

2240-520: 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

2304-570: 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

2368-466: The Mongols , a document that must originally have been written in Mongolian script in 1252, but which only survives in an edited version as a textbook for learning Mongolian from the Ming dynasty , thus reflecting the pronunciation of Middle Mongol from the second half of the 14th century. The term "Middle Mongol" is problematic insofar as there is no body of texts that is commonly called "Old Mongol". While

2432-599: 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

2496-583: 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

2560-452: 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,

2624-420: The interrogatives and the particle -ba(r) . The finite indicative verbal suffixes express different shades of temporal, aspectual and modal meaning, and the ones with a past meaning also agree with the subject in semantic/biological gender . There are two present and two past forms, with a modal distinction between a marked and unmarked form within each pair, and a pluperfect. The usual suffixes are displayed in

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2688-641: The labials /p/ and /m/ . The Wichita language of Oklahoma and some West African languages, such as Ijo , lack the consonant /n/ on a phonemic level, but do use it phonetically, as an allophone of another consonant (of /l/ in the case of Ijo, and of /ɾ/ in Wichita). A few languages on Bougainville Island and around Puget Sound , such as Makah , lack both of the nasals [m] and [n] altogether, except in special speech registers such as baby-talk. The 'click language' Nǁng lacks /t/ , and colloquial Samoan lacks both alveolars, /t/ and /n/ . Despite

2752-512: 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

2816-519: 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 ,

2880-449: The letter Y stands for the consonant/semi-vowel /j/ in y oke , the vowel /ɪ/ in m y th , the vowel /i/ in funn y , the diphthong /aɪ/ in sk y , and forms several digraphs for other diphthongs, such as sa y , bo y , ke y . Similarly, R commonly indicates or modifies a vowel in non-rhotic accents . This article is concerned with consonant sounds, however they are written. Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of

2944-484: The most common, and a liquid consonant or two, with /l/ the most common. The approximant /w/ is also widespread, and virtually all languages have one or more nasals , though a very few, such as the Central dialect of Rotokas , lack even these. This last language has the smallest number of consonants in the world, with just six. In rhotic American English, the consonants spoken most frequently are /n, ɹ, t/ . ( /ɹ/

3008-663: The nucleus of a syllable. This may be the case for words such as church in rhotic dialects of English, although phoneticians differ in whether they consider this to be a syllabic consonant, /ˈtʃɹ̩tʃ/ , or a rhotic vowel, /ˈtʃɝtʃ/ : Some distinguish an approximant /ɹ/ that corresponds to a vowel /ɝ/ , for rural as /ˈɹɝl/ or [ˈɹʷɝːl̩] ; others see these as a single phoneme, /ˈɹɹ̩l/ . Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of

3072-694: 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

3136-440: 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

3200-408: 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

3264-504: The reconstructed last common ancestor of the modern Mongolic languages , which dates it to shortly after the time when Genghis Khan united a number of tribes under his command and formed the Khamag Mongol . The term "Middle Mongol" or "Middle Mongolian" is somewhat misleading, since it is the earliest directly-attested (as opposed to reconstructed) ancestor of Modern Mongolian , and would therefore be termed "Old Mongolian" under

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3328-605: The sound spelled ⟨th⟩ in "this" is a different consonant from the ⟨th⟩ sound in "thin". (In the IPA, these are [ð] and [θ] , respectively.) The word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant- , from cōnsonāns 'sounding-together', a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon (plural sýmphōna , σύμφωνα ). Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna ( σύμφωνα 'sounded with') because in Greek they can only be pronounced with

3392-401: The stem ends in a vowel, the consonant /n/ or another consonant. There is also some chronological variation between earlier and later texts, as marked with the sign > in the table. The dative-locative may denote not only an indirect object, but also local and temporal expressions, both static and dynamic. The accusative ending may be replaced by the unmarked nominative, especially if the noun

3456-576: The syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil [ˈbɔɪ̯l] . On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the y in English yes [ˈjɛs] . Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/ , so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/ , beet would be /bii̯t/ , and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/ . Likewise, foot would be /fut/ , food would be /fuu̯d/ , wood would be /u̯ud/ , and wooed would be /u̯uu̯d/ . However, there

3520-432: The table below. As above, more innovative variants are introduced with the sign >. (-yi) -Ji'ai In addition, a durative suffix -nam is attested only in late Arabic sources (originally the converbal suffix -n , on which see below, combined with the copula a- in the narrative form). There are also some attestations of the finite use of a form in -d with plural subjects, whose singular may have been, again,

3584-624: The time gap for which little proper evidence is available. Middle Mongol survived in a number of scripts, namely notably ʼPhags-pa (decrees during the Yuan dynasty ), Arabic (dictionaries), Chinese , Mongolian script and a few western scripts. Usually, the Stele of Yisüngge is considered to be its first surviving monument. It is a sports report written in Mongolian writing that was already fairly conventionalized then and most often dated between 1224 and 1225. However, Igor de Rachewiltz argues that it

3648-651: The trill [r̩] and the lateral [l̩] as syllabic nuclei (see Words without vowels ). In languages like Nuxalk , it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of 'syllable' applies in Nuxalk, there are syllabic consonants in words like /sx̩s/ ( /s̩xs̩/ ?) 'seal fat'. Miyako in Japan is similar, with /f̩ks̩/ 'to build' and /ps̩ks̩/ 'to pull'. Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features : All English consonants can be classified by

3712-499: The usual conventions for naming historical forms of languages (compare the distinction between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese ). Although the existence of an earlier ("old") Mongol clan federation in Mongolia during the 12th century is historical, there is no surviving language material from that period. According to Vovin (2019), the Rouran language of the Rouran Khaganate was a Mongolic language and close, but not identical, to Middle Mongolian. Juha Janhunen (2006) classified

3776-400: 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

3840-533: 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

3904-446: The world's languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels , semiconsonants , or glides . On one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of

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3968-896: 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

4032-407: 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 . Consonant Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet , linguists have devised systems such as

4096-412: 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,

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