The possible precursor to Mongolic is the
Xianbei language, heavily influenced by the
Proto-Turkic (later, the
Lir-Turkic) language. The stages of
historical Mongolic are: • Pre-Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 4th century AD until the 12th century AD, influenced by
Shaz-Turkic. •
Proto-Mongolic, from approximately the 13th century, spoken around the time of
Chinggis Khan. •
Middle Mongol, from the 13th century until the early 15th century or late 16th century, depending on classification spoken. (Given the almost entire lack of written sources for the period in between, an exact cutoff point cannot be established.) Again influenced by
Turkic. •
Classical Mongolian, from approximately 1700 to 1900. •
Standard Mongolian The standard Mongolian language has been in official use since 1919, and this form of the language is used in the economic, political, and social fields.
Pre-Proto-Mongolic 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, 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).
Relationship with Turkic Pre-Proto-Mongolic has borrowed various words from
Turkic languages. In 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: • Mongolic
ikere (twins) from Pre-Proto-Bulgaric
ikir (versus Common Turkic
ekiz) • Mongolic
hüker (ox) from Pre-Proto-Bulgaric
hekür (Common Turkic
öküz) • Mongolic
jer (weapon) from Pre-Proto-Bulgaric
jer (Common Turkic
yäz) • Mongolic
biragu (calf) versus Common Turkic
buzagu • Mongolic
siri- (to smelt ore) versus Common Turkic
siz- (to melt) 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 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 ''
(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 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 Proto-Mongolic, the ancestor language of the modern Mongolic languages, is very close to Middle Mongol, 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, 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.
Middle Mongol The changes from Proto-Mongolic to Middle Mongol are described below.
Changes in phonology Consonants Research into reconstruction of 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/, *''
(~ *[k]
, *) 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/
was lost in some instances, which raises the question of what the conditioning factors of those instances were. More recently, 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 *, 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. was
spirantized to in Ulaanbaatar Khalkha and the Mongolian dialects south of it, e.g. Preclassical Mongolian
kündü, reconstructed as '''' 'heavy', became Modern Mongolian (but in the vicinity of
Bayankhongor and
Baruun-Urt, many speakers will say ). Originally word-final *
n turned into /ŋ/; if *'
was originally followed by a vowel that later dropped, it remained unchanged, e.g. ' became , but '
became . After i-breaking, became phonemic. Consonants in words containing back vowels that were followed by ' in Proto-Mongolian became
palatalized in Modern Mongolian. In some words, word-final '''' 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.
Vowels The standard view is that Proto-Mongolic had '
. According to this view, ' and '
were pharyngealized to and , then ' and '
were velarized to and . Thus, the vowel harmony shifted from a velar to a pharyngeal paradigm. ' in the first syllable of back-vocalic words was
assimilated to the following vowel; in word-initial position it became . '
was rounded to when followed by '. VhV and VjV sequences where the second vowel was any vowel but '
were monophthongized. In noninitial syllables, short vowels were deleted from the phonetic representation of the word and long vowels became short; e.g. ' ('
becomes , ' disappears) > ''
(unstable n'' drops; vowel reduction) > /jama(n)/ 'goat', and '
(regressive rounding assimilation) > ' (vowel velarization) > '''' (vowel reduction) > /oms-/ 'to wear' This reconstruction has recently been opposed, arguing that vowel developments across the Mongolic languages can be more economically explained starting from basically the same vowel system as Khalkha, only with ''
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.
Changes in morphology Nominal system "-shaped bracket, and to the right of each such bracket, there are other medium-sized characters|
The Secret History of the Mongols which goes back to a lost Mongolian script original is the only document that allows the reconstruction of agreement in social gender in Middle Mongol. 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 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 -
luɣ-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
uruɣu 'downwards'. Social gender agreement was abandoned.
Verbal system Middle Mongol 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. {{interlinear|indent=3|abbreviations=NFUT:nonfuture 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. ==Classification==