The Mongolic Languages

Juha Janhunen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135796891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Lingue

Once the rulers of the largest land empire that has ever existed on earth, the historical Mongols of Chinggis Khan left a linguistic heritage which today survives in the form of more than a dozen different languages, collectively termed Mongolic. For general linguistic theory, the Mongolic languages offer interesting insights to problems of areal typology and structural change. An understanding of the Mongolic language family is also a prerequisite for the study of Mongolian and Central Eurasian history and culture. This volume is the first comprehensive treatment of the Mongolic languages in English, written by an international team of specialists.

CHAPTER ONE

PROTO-MONGOLIC

Juha Janhunen

Proto-Mongolic is the technical term for the common ancestor of all the living and historically attested Mongolic languages. By definition, Proto-Mongolic was spoken at a time when the differentiation of the present-day Mongolic languages had not yet begun. Like all protolanguages, Proto-Mongolic is an abstraction that can only be approached by the comparative and diachronic analysis of the synchronically known Mongolic languages. For the very reason that Proto-Mongolic is not actually attested our understanding of it will always remain imperfect. However, compared with many other Eurasian protolanguages, Proto-Mongolic is nevertheless relatively easily accessible due to the fact that the genetic relations between the Mongolic languages are even synchronically fairly transparent and, consequently, chronologically shallow.

The absolute dating of Proto-Mongolic depends on when, exactly, the linguistic unity of its speakers ended. For historical reasons it is commonly assumed that this happened only after the geographical dispersal of the ancient Mongols under Chinggis Khan and his heirs, in any case not earlier than the thirteenth century. This means that the presentday differences between the Mongolic languages are likely to be the result of less than 800 years of divergent evolution. If this is so, the Mongolic languages offer a laboratory example on how far linguistic evolution and diversification can take a language during such a limited time span. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the Mongolic languages have clearly not evolved at a uniform pace, for some of them, like Khamnigan Mongol, are conspicuously conservative and still relatively close to Proto-Mongolic, while others, like the languages of the Gansu-Qinghai complex, have undergone much more rapid and, as it seems, fundamental changes.

Philological evidence for the shallow dating of Proto-Mongolic is provided by the written documents surviving from the times of the historical Mongols and representing the Middle Mongol and Written Mongol languages. It is important to note that neither Written Mongol nor Middle Mongol is identical with Proto-Mongolic. Especially in the case of Written Mongol, including Preclassical Written Mongol, the inherent anachronism of the language makes a direct comparison with any particular diachronic stage of Mongolic impossible, or at least controversial. Nevertheless, it may confidently be said that the central properties of Written Mongol, like also the preserved sources on Middle Mongol, reflect a spoken language that was very close to the reconstructed idiom that emerges from the comparative analysis of the living Mongolic languages.

The chronological shallowness of Proto-Mongolic has two important consequences for linguistic conclusions. On the one hand, its grammatical structure and lexical resources can be reconstructed in great detail and with considerable accuracy, allowing it to be examined for synchronic purposes almost like a living language. On the other hand, Proto-Mongolic does not take us very far back in time, which makes its further diachronic analysis problematic, especially in view of external comparisons. The time gap of up to several thousands of years that separates Proto-Mongolic from some of the more ancient protolanguages of Eurasia can only imperfectly be filled by the methods of diachronic linguistics, such as internal reconstruction. Therefore, any external comparisons using Proto-Mongolic material should be carried out with the necessary caution, and with a proper understanding of the chronological discrepancy.

One aspect that can never be reconstructed by the comparative method is the internal diversity within Proto-Mongolic. Like all real languages, and like all protolanguages, Proto-Mongolic was certainly no uniform linguistic entity. It must have had some areal and social variation, part of which may survive in the synchronic material of the Modern Mongolic languages. Also, due to the distorting effect of the comparative method, it may well have had more grammatical and lexical idiosyncrasies and irregularities than can be reconstructed on the basis of the synchronic material. However, for methodological reasons we have no alternative to defining Proto-Mongolic as a maximally uniform and regular idiom, from which the actual synchronic diversity within Mongolic can be derived.

PERIODIZATION

Since Proto-Mongolic is the reconstructed ancestor of the Modern Mongolic languages, it can only contain features that can be induced from the extant language material. The application of internal reconstruction and external comparisons to the Proto-Mongolic corpus do, however, yield limited information also on the stages preceding Proto- Mongolic. These stages may be termed Pre-Proto-Mongolic. Correspondingly, any phenomena chronologically younger than Proto-Mongolic may be identified as Post- Proto-Mongolic. Unlike Proto-Mongolic, which represents a single point on the time scale, both Pre-Proto-Mongolic and Post-Proto-Mongolic are open continuums. Pre-Proto- Mongolic, in particular, extends indefinitely far back in time as long as diachronic conclusions are possible.

In practice, the conclusions that can be made by the method of internal reconstruction concerning the structural and material properties of Pre-Proto-Mongolic involve mainly the linguistic stage immediately preceding Proto-Mongolic. This stage may also be called Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic, and in terms of absolute chronology it may be dated to the last centuries preceding the rise of the historical Mongols. Some of the earlier stages of Pre-Proto-Mongolic can be approached through the analysis of the traces of areal contacts with neighbouring language families, notably Turkic and Tungusic. Also, there is the tantalizing possibility that future research will further increase the time depth of reconstruction by giving us more insights into the Para-Mongolic linguistic diversity that is likely to have coexisted with Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic.

Among the extant Mongolic languages, the only one that may give us some direct information on the linguistic characteristics of Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic is Written Mongol, whose orthographical and morphological anachronisms include a few peculiarities that appear to reflect diachronic stages extending beyond Proto-Mongolic. Written Mongol is also likely to preserve traces of the dialectal diversity that actually existed in both Proto-Mongolic and Pre-Proto-Mongolic times. This diversity was extinguished at the level of the spoken language by the ethnic and political (re)unification of the Mongols under Chinggis Khan.

We might also say that the period of the Mongol empire functioned as a kind of linguistic bottleneck. Prior to the time of Chinggis Khan, the speech of the ancient Mongols may be assumed to have been a conglomeration of geographically dispersed tribal idioms, including those of the Naiman, the Kereit, the Mongols proper, and others. These tribal idioms seem to have been mutually intelligible, and they may therefore be classified as dialects of Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic. However, in the absence of factual information we will never know what the actual degree of diversity was. In any case, with the victory of Chinggis Khan, intensive linguistic unification took place, and, as a result, the primary dialects were lost in favour of a more homogeneous Proto-Mongolic language. The latter, in turn, yielded a number of Post-Proto-Mongolic secondary dialects, to which the Modern Mongolic languages can be traced.

For some purposes, it is useful to make a distinction between the concepts of Proto- Mongolic and Common Mongolic. While Proto-Mongolic implies any reconstructed feature that actually derives from the Proto-Mongolic period, Common Mongolic can also comprise Post-Proto-Mongolic features shared by the Mongolic languages on an areal basis. Due to the geographical closeness and genetic compactness of the core group of the Modern Mongolic languages, it is often impossible to draw an unambiguous line between primary genetic retentions and secondary areal innovations. In many cases, even very late elements, especially in the lexicon, can exhibit the same type of correspondences as the inherited component of the modern languages. In case of ambiguity it is always safer to speak of Common Mongolic, rather than Proto-Mongolic. This is true of both lexical elements and structural properties.

Technically speaking, there are two types of criterion that can be used in order to establish the Proto-Mongolic origin of any given feature. The first type may be identified as distributional, and it is based on the linguistic fact that Proto-Mongolic features tend to have a wide distribution in the modern languages. In particular, any feature that is attested in, or perhaps restricted to, two or more peripheral Mongolic branches, such as Moghol, Dagur, or the Gansu-Qinghai complex, is likely to represent common Proto-Mongolic heritage. However, it should be kept in mind that the absence of a feature from the peripheral languages does by no means rule out the possibility of its Proto-Mongolic origin.

The second type of criterion may be identified as documentary, and it is based on the philological circumstance that written documents dating from either Middle Mongol or early Preclassical Written Mongol are more or less contemporaneous with Proto- Mongolic. If a linguistic feature is attested in such documents, we can infer that it was present in the Proto-Mongolic language. Again, it should be noted that the presence of such documentation is no prerequisite for linguistic reconstruction. Proto-Mongolic is and remains a product of the comparative method, and the fact that idioms close to it happen to be recorded in written documents is only of secondary interest from the reconstructive point of view. In this respect, Proto-Mongolic is comparable with any other relatively recent protolanguage which once coexisted with a close-lying literary standard (cf. e.g. the case of Latin vs. Proto-Romance).

DATA AND SOURCES

The application of the comparative method to the diachronic analysis of Mongolic became possible only when the synchronic investigation of the living Mongolic languages was initiated by scholars such as M. A. Castrén, G. J. Ramstedt, W)adys)aw Kotwicz, Andrei Rudnev, and others. Much of the early comparative work was focused on listing the differences between Written Mongol and the various Modern Mongolic languages and dialects, notably Khalkha. Middle Mongol provided another concrete point of comparison. Unfortunately, the easy availability of a diachronic perspective through Written Mongol and Middle Mongol has always tended to remain an obstacle, rather than a stimulation, to the strictly linguistic understanding of Proto-Mongolic.

The actual comparative work on Mongolic has become increasingly challenging with the introduction of fresh synchronic data on the previously little-known peripheral languages of the family. Even so, there are still several Mongolic languages, including, in particular, those of the Gansu-Qinghai complex, that remain not fully integrated into the comparative framework. While it is generally assumed that these languages derive from a protolanguage identical with the reconstructable ancestor of the more centrally located Mongolic idioms, many diachronic details remain unclear, making any definitive conclusions concerning the genetic and areal developments impossible for the time being.

As in all diachronic linguistics, phonology has always played a central role in Mongolic comparative studies. Two constantly recurrent issues include the role of the ‘laryngeals’ and the phenomenon of vowel breaking, as discussed, among others, by G. J. Ramstedt (1912), Paul Pelliot (1925), Nicholas Poppe (1956), and Juha Janhunen (1990, 1999). A more temporary controversy was involved in the dispute over the so-called ‘primary long vowels’, as discussed by Masayoshi Nomura (1959), Nicholas Poppe (1962), Shirô Hattori (1970), and Gerhard Doerfer (1969–74). Among the multitude of other contributions to Mongolic diachronic phonology, the brief but innovative paper by Eugene Helimski (1984) on Gansu-Qinghai Mongolic deserves to be singled out.

While much of the comparative work on Mongolic in the past has been a side-product of general Altaic studies, as developed by Ramstedt (1952–66) and Poppe (1960, 1965, 1975), the important handbooks by Poppe (1955) and G. D. Sanzheev (1953–64) focus specifically on the Mongolic languages. Poppe’s work, in particular, remains by far the most explicit and internationally accessible synthesis of Mongolic comparative phonology and morphology. With the exception of the brief synopsis by Doerfer (1964), later general works, such as those by P. A. Darvaev (1988) and A. A. Darbeeva (1996), offer no substantially new insights. Tömörtogoo (1992) is nevertheless useful as a bibliographical tool, while G. C. Pyurbeev (1993) introduces some aspects of comparative syntax.

Outside the general Altaic framework, relatively little has been written on the dialectological and chronological aspects of Proto-Mongolic. An attempt to approach Late Pre- Proto-Mongolic, or ‘Ancient Mongolian’, largely by the method of internal reconstruction, was nevertheless made by Poppe (1976). Another important contribution is that by Michael Weiers (1970) on the periodization of Proto-Mongolic in relationship to Written Mongol and M...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chart of Romanization
• Chapter One: Proto-Mongolic
• Chapter Two: Written Mongol
• Chapter Three: Middle Mongol
• Chapter Four: Khamnigan Mongol
• Chapter Five: Buryat
• Chapter Six: Dagur
• Chapter Seven: Khalkha
• Chapter Eight: Mongol Dialects
• Chapter Nine: Ordos
• Chapter Ten: Oirat
• Chapter Eleven: Kalmuck
• Chapter Twelve: Moghol
• Chapter Thirteen: Shira Yughur
• Chapter Fourteen: Mongghul
• Chapter Fifteen: Mangghuer
• Chapter Sixteen: Bonan
• Chapter Seventeen: Santa
• Chapter Eighteen: Intra-Mongolic Taxonomy
• Chapter Nineteen: Para-Mongolic
• Chapter Twenty: Turko-Mongolic Relations