Middle Mongol

The paper deals with the structural analysis of the system of kinship and affinity terms in Middle Mongolian based on all known lexicographical and narrative sources. The system of kinship and affinity terms is seen as a separate lexical group which is to be studied by methods of structural semantics, in particular by the method of componential analysis. This method is for the first time applied to the study of Middle Mongolian vocabulary. The meaning of each kinship or affinity term is defined in the meta-language of componential analysis in its two varieties, main structural features of the system are discovered and defined, the dialectal distribution, inter- and intradialectal lexical differences among the terms are described and presented in the form of tables. The morphological classification of the terms is given, the question of the polysemy of some of them is touched upon. The author comes to the conclusion that East Middle Mongolian dialects and their system of kinship and affinity terms could be in a more archaic stage of development than the language of West Middle Mongolian literary monuments. The results of the semantic analysis are compared with some historical and ethnographical data on the Mongolian social structure of the imperial period (in particular on kinship system and marriage rules).

The present paper deals with some particularities of affricates in Middle Mongol (13th – 16th centuries) as related to the problem of reconstructing the (Pre)-Proto-Mongolic consonant system. Three particularities of Middle Mongol affricates are especially highlighted: (1) č ~ ǰ alternation; (2) alliteration of the type č – ǰ or ǰ – č; (3) underdifferentiation of the medial č and ǰ in Uighur-Mongol script. Examples of the non-distinctive use of affricates in the Modern Mongolic languages as e.g. those spoken in Qinghai and Gansu provinces (Eastern Yugur and Shirongol) and the central Mon-golic group (Khalkha, Buryat, Kalmyk) are given as well. The author comes to the conclusion that in Proto-Mongolic the distinction between *č and *ǰ may have been a phonemic one, while at the Pre-Proto-Mongolic stage *č and *ǰ were presumably free-variant allophones of the same consonant phoneme **C. Our reconstruction seems to be confirmed by the evidence from Khitan where alternation of the segments <c> and <dz> occurred, probably dating back to the Pre-Proto-Mongolic stage.

The paper deals with the reflexes of Proto-Mongolic *VgV and *VxV groups as occurred in the Dada yu/Beilu yiyu, a little known Sino-Mongol glossary dated between 1567 and 1603. The results obtained from a detailed examination of the glossary’s language material in a historical comparative perspective allow us to draw some nontrivial conclusions about the origin and development of these groups in the Mongolic languages. For the *VgV group, the following reflexes are attested: (1.1) *VgV > VgV (e.g. buγu ‘deer’ < *bugu, hünegen ‘fox’ < *hünegen; regular development), (1.2) *VgV > VxV (e.g. toχorawun ‘crane (bird)’< *toguraxun, üdüxü ‘vagina’ < *hütügü/n; irregular development also present in Kalmuck, Buryat, and the Gansu-Qinghai languages), (1.3) *VgV > VkV (ökeʨi ‘elder sister’< *egeči; occasional development also observed in Middle Mongol sources, as well as in some modern Mongolic languages). The *VxV group has the following reflexes: (2.1) *VxV > VwV (e.g. nawur ‘lake’ < *naxur, seriwün ‘cool’ < *serixün; largely attested in Middle Mongol, but only irregularly occurring in the modern Mongolic languages such as Dagur) (2.2) *VxV > V’V (e.g. ari’un ‘clean, pure’ < *arïxun, dolo’an ‘seven’ < *doloxan; hiatus typical for Middle Mongol, but not represented in modern Mongolic languages), (2.3) *VxV > VV (e.g. aula ‘mountain’ < *axula, neü- ‘to move, migrate’ < *nexü-; diphthongs well attested in late Middle Mongol and partly preserved in Dagur, Moghol, Dongxiang, Mongghul, and Mangghuer), (2.4) *VhV > V̄ (e.g. berē ‘club, cudgel’ < *berixe, tōsu ‘dust’ < *toxasu/n; contracted long vowels found in most modern Mongolic languages). A combination of archaic (2.1, 2.2) and innovative (2.3, 2.4) features in the Mongol idiom reflected in the glossary leads us to the conclusion that it may be identified as belonging to a transitional stage between Middle Mongol and Modern Mongolian, with a statistically significant predominance of linguistic features characteristic of the latter. The cases of irregular and unpredictable fluctuation between intervocalic *g, *k, *x in the Mongolic languages are discussed as well. A new scheme of the development of Proto-Mongolic intervocalic velars from a common source is proposed by the author, which may refine and elaborate the existing Proto-Mongolic reconstructions.

This paper briefly introduces the most important linguistic features of the Yiyu (Beilu yiyu) – a Chinese-Middle Mongol glossary included in the Dengtan Bijiu (1599) with special focus on the unstable -n nouns, representation of the initial h-, loanwords in the lexicon, number of syllables etc.

This paper presents a new approach to reading the Preclassical Mongol inscription on the 1413 Tyr stele, now kept at Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). The stele contains texts carved in three languages: Chinese, Jurchen, and Mongol. The Jurchen and Mongol texts are very close to each other in content , as well as in the grammatical structure of words and sentences. For this reason, some missing and previously illegible parts of the Mongol text can be reconstructed and read on the basis of the Jurchen version. Lines 2 and 3 of the Mongol inscription have already been discussed earlier in a separate publication. In the present paper, the same approach, combined with a careful investigation of all the existing photos and rubbings of the inscription, is extended to lines 4 to 9.

The paper deals with the noun case system of the ''Dada yu/Beilu yiyu'', a little known Sino-Mongol glossary dated between 1567 and 1603. Of seven grammatical cases commonly distinguished in Proto-Mongolic, only four are attested in the Mongol language material of the glossary: nominative (the unmarked basic stem), genitive, accusative, and dative. The forms, functions and grammatical meanings of these cases are thoroughly discussed in the paper. Some features may be considered to be linguistic archaisms, e.g. formal coincidence of the accusative marker +i with one of the morphonological allomorphs of the genitive, or the variant ending +in ~ +Un used after consonant stems. However, there are a number of clearly innovative developments, such as the dative ending shape +DU < *+DU/r. In addition, some idiosyncratic features of the glossary can be distinguished as well, e.g. no overt morphosyntactic marking on the dependent in possessive phrases. A conclusion can be made that the case system of the language variety as attested in the ''Dada yu/Beilu yiyu'' may have reflected a transitional stage between Middle Mongol and Modern Mongolian.

The paper deals with the Mongolian inscription on the first Tyr stele (1413) — a little known monument of Preclassical Written Mongol which is now found in Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). In the paper, the main grammatical, phonetic, and lexical features of the text are described, which are charac-teristic of Preclassical Written Mongol and Middle Mongol monuments altogether. While retaining a number of clearly archaic features, probably of Proto-Mongolic origin, the inscription contains some innovative developments which seem to date from the Post-Proto-Mongolic stage and reflect colloquial and/or dialectal influence. A few phonological and lexical features, as well as the place and circumstances of its appearance, enables us to consider it as belonging to the Eastern dialect zone of Middle Mongol.

(An unpublished paper from 2013 containing some opinions on the historical phonology of Turkic which I no longer entertain)
The ambiguous verbal suffix -zU occurs only twice in the whole Old Turkic corpus. In the introduction, it is concluded that it is a virtually obsolete causal converb.
Having analysed the sound change *ǰ > z in Turkic by means of various cases, *-r2U and *-ǰU are presented as two equally possible Proto-Turkic reconstructions of the converbial suffix -zU. Since internal evidence is indecisive in reconstructing -zU as *-r2U or *-ǰU, external evidence is taken into account.
The Mongolic converbs in -ǰi ~ -ǰU and -rUn are suggested as two possible cognates of -zU. Both are discussed in detail, and the Mongolic converb in -ǰi ~ -ǰU is ruled out due to its semantic discrepancy. It is concluded that Mongolic -rUn might be the cognate of Turkic -zU whereas Mongolic -ǰi ~ -ǰU is a borrowing of the Turkic converb in *-dI.

The article deals with the Middle Mongolian word aram which occurs as a hapax legomenon in the Secret History of the Mongols (§ 124). The author examines the problems of phonetic reconstruction and semantics of the keyword which provoke controversy among the researchers of the monument. The conclusion is made that aram is an occasional Turkic loanword which is borrowed from Old Turkic aran ‘a stable’, ‘cattle pen’, ‘a stake with a loop for tethering animals᾿. The difference in the final consonants between the Old Turkic and the Middle Mongolian forms is explained as well.

The article deals with the problem of dating and provenance of the Sino-Mongol glossary ''Dada yu/Beilu yiyu'' compiled under the Ming dynasty. The author is basing his conclusions on the analysis of some place names that occur in the glossary. The place names are studied in the light of historico-geographical works from the Ming period. The author comes to the conclusion that the original text of the glossary was compiled between 1567 and 1603 in northern China (Xuanfu–Datong area). The paper also addresses a number of textological issues, e.g. a comparative study of the main copies of the glossary.

This is the first book on the Serbi-Mongolic language family—a major language family of Asia —and the first modern linguistic study of the Serbi (Xianbei 鮮卑) peoples, whose conquest of North China took place at approximately the same time as the Germanic and Hunnic _Völkerwanderung_ into the former Western Roman Empire. The findings presented in this book— the first rigorous and systematic unified theory on the origins of the Mongolic and Serbi languages—add substantially to our understanding of the linguistic geography of Eastern Eurasia, and to the ethnolinguistic history of the Mongolic peoples and their neighbors, including speakers of Chinese, Japanese-Koguryoic, Tibeto-Burman, Tungusic, possibly Indo-European, and later, Turkic. This book also enhances our understanding of attested Middle Chinese, Early Old Mandarin, and Old Tibetan phonology. Moreover, it is the first study to present linguistic sketches of Taghbach (Tuoba 拓跋), Tuyuhun 吐谷渾 (’Azha འ་ཞ་), and Kitan (Qidan 契丹), and systematically compare Kitan and Mongol morphological and syntactic paradigms, resulting in the first reconstruction of Common Serbi-Mongolic phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax. Readers interested in Mongolia, the Mongols, North China, Central Eurasia, the Tibetan Empire, languages of Asia, historical linguistics, and history will find this book to be a useful resource.

The article deals with the main principles according to which Mongolian sounds are rendered into Chinese in the Sino-Mongolian glossary Dada yu/Beilu yiyu (late 16th–early 17th cent.) where one of the late Middle Mongolian dialects is reflected. Three such principles are distinguished by the author: 1) principle of phonetic identity (the Chinese and Mongolian segments completely coincide with each other by their features); 2) principle of phonetic substitution in its two varieties: weak phonetic substitution (the Chinese and Mongolian segments differ from each other in only one distinctive feature) and strong phonetic substitution (the Chinese and Mongolian segments are distinguished from each other by two or more features); 3) principle of zero marking (the Mongolian segment is in no way rendered into the Chinese transcription because of the impossibility of its notation by means of Chinese). The influence of different stages of the phonetic development of Chinese on the glossary’s system of transcriptions is also emphasized, such as Standard Chinese, Late Ming Guanhua, and Ancient Mandarin.

Full book available at: https://brill.com/view/title/19379 The Yiyu (Beilu yiyu) – a Chinese-Middle Mongol glossary included in the Dengtan Bijiu (a military handbook for generals compiled during the Wanli period of the Ming dynasty) – is an important source regarding the history of the Mongolian language. The manuscript version of Yiyu is a copy made for Louis Ligeti on his first expedition to China (1928-31) and is now conserved by the Oriental Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
In his edition the author reconstructs the often chaotic material of the Yiyu with the help of other available Yiyu texts. Next to its contribution in transcription and reconstruction, this work is indispensable in terms of linguistic analysis, dealing with much investigated issues of Middle Mongol (e.g. suffixes, unstable -n nouns, representation of the initial h-, loanwords in the lexicon, lack or presence of intervocalic velar fricatives etc.).
A full word index, a classical Mongolian reference wordlist and four other indexes are included in this edition as well as the facsimile photocopies of both the manuscript and a block print version of the glossary.

Terms of impoliteness, rudeness and profanity are segments of vocabulary old Chinese dictionaries, glossaries or encyclopaedias are not introducing in their full varieties. For this reason it is a kind of rarity when one finds a bunch of expressions apparently of vernacular origin, and it is even more extraordinary that they are not only listed in Chinese but being a part of a bilingual glossary included in the largest Chinese military compilation, the Wu Bei Zhi (武備志), their Middle Mongolian translations are also presented. The author presents a study introducing the related vocabulary from both sides of the glossary and alongside analyses the likeliness of their actual use by the time of compilation from the point of view of historical pragmatics.

Paradigmatic morphology is a central and crucial concept for several branches of comparative linguistics. The observation of shared paradigms in languages which were not suspected of having a common ancestry stands at the cradle of modern ge-nealogical linguistics and dominates the discussion(s) about not firmly established or merely putative language families or phyla to this day, the very different morphological techniques different languages use for the formation of paradigms mark the beginning of language typology, now a major pillar of the language sciences, and the question, to which degree languages—closely, distantly, or not at all related with each other— may borrow morphological paradigms (part or whole) from each other or might have done so in the past (which, if true and not properly detected, might lead to superficially persuasive, but factually erroneous, claims and hypotheses of genealogical relatedness) continues to be an important theoretical and practical issue in comparative linguistics. The contributions to this volume address, i. a., all of these questions and areas and offer much food for thought about historical morphology, areal linguistics and, above all, language classification—going far beyond the " Altaic hypothesis " , which figures prominently in some of them.

In a recent academic project I have reconstructed the Middle Mongol vocabulary of the 17th century comprehensive Chinese military work called Lulongsai lüe (盧龍塞略), a document of key importance containing one of the last Sino-Mongol glossaries without proper critical reconstruction until now. The reconstruction resulted in a near complete clarification of the earlier sources the compilers of this work used in the bilingual part. I found that in opposition to what scholars have thought of it until now the material is not homogeneous and does not represent a single linguistic status, it does, however, throw some light on the chronological and philological questions concerning the earlier works incorporated in it.

The paper deals with the Preclassical Mongol inscription on the 1413 Tyr stele, now kept at Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). It contains the texts carved in three languages: Chinese, Jurchen, and Mongol. The Jurchen and Mongol texts are very close to each other in content as well as in grammatical structure of words and sentences. The author tries to demonstrate the importance of this conclusion for decipherment or tentative reconstruction of some missing and previously illegible parts of the Mongol inscription. The new reading of lines 2 and 3 of the Mongol inscription proposed in the paper is based on thorough comparison of lacunae in the Mongol text with the corresponding parts of the Jurchen one which are preserved in better condition, as combined with a more careful investigation of all the existing photos and rubbings of the inscription , especially old photos of the monument kept among A. M. Pozdneev's materials in the Archives of the Institute for Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg). The overall results demonstrate a substantial progress in reading the Mongol inscription as compared to previous scholarly works on the subject.

The article presents an introduction to the study of the "Dada guan zazi", a Sino-Mongol glossary from the Ming period, dating back presumably to the late 15th century. A brief overview of the content and internal division of the text, as well as its main copies, is provided in the general context of the study of foreign languages in China under the Ming. As a supplement, the reconstruction of the Mongolian text of the section ‘Astronomy’ (entries Nos. 1–19) is published for the first time.

. The present paper is part of a series of articles dealing with the Sino-Mongol glossary "Dada yu 韃靼語"/"Beilu yiyu 北虜譯語", a little-known lexicographical work dated between 1567 and 1603. The author concentrates on the Chinese transcription of Mongol affricates in connection with the problem of their phonemic qualities and position in the sound system of a transitional late Middle Mongol to early Modern Mongolian dialect as reflected in the glossary. The influence of different historical varieties of Chinese on the glossary’s system of transcriptions is emphasized, such as: (1) the northern koine pronunciation system of the 16th to 17th centuries, or the so-called “Northern Pronunciation” (beyin 北音), an ancestor form of Modern Standard Chinese; (2) standard Late Ming Guanhua 官話 sound system of the 15th to 17th centuries, or the so-called “Southern Pronunciation” (nanyin 南音), based on Nankingese and other Yangtze watershed Mandarin dialects; and (3) Old Mandarin, a spoken koine of the 12th to 14th centuries that reflects the pronunciation used at the Yuan 元 dynasty capital, Dadu 大都 (later to become Peking). On the basis of the Chinese transcriptions, two series of affricates, an aspirated one ([ʧh], [ʨh], [tsh]) and an unaspirated one ([ʧ], [ʨ], [ts]), can be identified in the sound system of the Mongol dialect of the glossary. An interesting feature of the latter is the presence of voiceless aspirated alveopalatal affricates ʨ [ʨh] and ʥ [ʨ] that may have developed from earlier Middle Mongol palato-alveolars č [ʧh] and ǰ [ʧ] before an original *i. As for c [tsh] and ʒ [ts], they are attested in just a few lexical items and may be considered to be marginal allophones of the phonemes č [ʧh] and ǰ [ʧ], respectively. The author comes to the conclusion that the structures of both aspirated and unaspirated series are fully identical: each of them consists of a basic allophone ([ʧh] vs. [ʧ]) and two non-basic positional allophones, one of which ([tsh] vs. [ts]) may furthermore be viewed as marginal or problematic due to its highly restricted distribution.

The paper deals with the Mongolian inscription on the first Tyr stele (1413) — a little known monument of Preclassical Written Mongol which is now found in Primorye State Museum named after V. K. Arsenyev (Vladivostok, Russia). In the paper, the main grammatical, phonetic, and lexical features of the text are described, which are charac-teristic of Preclassical Written Mongol and Middle Mongol monuments altogether. While retaining a number of clearly archaic features, probably of Proto-Mongolic origin, the inscription contains some innovative developments which seem to date from the Post-Proto-Mongolic stage and reflect colloquial and/or dialectal influence. A few phonological and lexical features, as well as the place and circumstances of its appearance, enables us to consider it as belonging to the Eastern dialect zone of Middle Mongol.

The article deals with the problem of dating and provenance of the
Sino-Mongolian glossary ''Dada yu''/ ''Beilu yiyu'' compiled under the Ming dynasty. The author is basing his conclusions on the analysis of some place names that occur in the glossary. The place names are studied in the light of historico-geographical works from the Ming period. The author comes to the conclusion that the original text of the glossary was compiled between 1567 and 1603 in northern China (Xuanfu–Datong area), while the Mongolian language material may have been obtained
from the Tümeds, the nearest northern neighbors of China. The paper also addresses a number of textological issues, e. g. a comparative study of the main copies of the glossary.

Full book available at: https://iupress.org/9780933070578/the-early-mongols-language-culture-and-history/
Edited by Volker Rybatzki, Alessandra Pozzi, Peter W. Geier and John R. Krueger

Although there seems to exist a generally accepted view
in academic circles concerning the essentially homogeneous dialectal
nature of Middle Mongol 2 with marked but sometimes controversial
differences between its Western and Eastern manifestations, however, in
particular cases one finds extraordinary occurrences of forms or even
regularities uncommon in other sources or being divergent from Middle
Mongol «proper».
9780933070578

The paper addresses some peculiarities of affricates in Middle Mongol (13th–16th centuries) as related to the problem of reconstructing the (Pre)-Proto-Mongolic consonant system. Three peculiarities of Middle Mongol affricates are highlighted: (1) fluctuation between č and ǰ; (2) alliteration of the type č–ǰ or ǰ–č; and (3) underdifferentiation of the medial č and ǰ in Uighur-Mongol script. Examples of the non-distinctive use of affricates in modern Mongolic languages such as those spoken in Qinghai and Gansu Provinces (Eastern Yugur and Shirongol) and the languages of the Central Mongolic Group (Khalkha, Buryat, Kalmyk) are provided as well. The paper concludes that in Proto-Mongolic, the distinction between *č and *ǰ may have been phonemic, while at the Pre-Proto-Mongolic stage, *č and *ǰ were presumably free-variant allophones of the same consonant phoneme **C. This reconstruction seems to be confirmed by the evidence from Khitan, where the fluctuation between the segments <c> and <dz> probably dates back to the Pre-Proto-Mongolic stage.