First, a vast empire. Then, a linguistic family evolved from one
known language over such a short time depth. This is Mongolic. Today we take a broad journey through its
history, its basic family resemblances, and the diverse traits of its many members, including
one recent attempt to reach further back and recover even older relatives that extend the
Mongolic family. A year and a half ago I got animated about
what early Mongol sounded like. Here I read about and listened to languages
across a family, took a bunch of notes, but only said the smallest bit about them at the
end. Then I did it again for Altaic. And yet again for Khitan! No no, this can't go on. Patrons decided it's time we get to know Mongolic
better. Ok wait, I've already cut and drawn so many
horses, do we really need...? Yes we do. Here's another. Mongolic had a common ancestor. One language, spread by one ruler. A great empire that created a unique language
bottleneck, forming a common dialect for all Mongol people. What happened before that gets murky, but
stay to the end for one increasingly prominent pre-Mongolic explanation. From empire to now, that's eight centuries,
Mongolic branched out. A whole top-level language family in that
short span seems unusual. Writings remain from nearly the start. Preclassical Written Mongol records the official
imperial language. Later, a stricter classical form emerges for
writing Buddhist texts. But now isn't the time to get all into why, say,
this makes sense for spelling the color "red", but know there's definitely a learning curve
and a lot of history baked in. Various other scripts record Middle Mongol,
notably, Chinese characters in the Secret History. And this is where we get to start slicing
things thin, because Written and Middle Mongol are different. And neither quite matches what we expect of
the common Mongolic ancestor. Instead, the family started from a proto-language
that was almost like Middle Mongol, and which already had the typical Mongolic traits. Let me sketch some of those traits. A robust set of consonants, curiously missing
one of the most common sounds in the world: /p/. They had a sound /x/ but it was in the process
of dropping out from the middle and from the start of words, so their word for "red", probably something like /xulaxan/, already risked sounding like it does in modern Mongolian. Vowels formed three neat sets, back versus
front versus neutral /i/, which was originally two in pre-Proto-Mongolic. There was no difference in length, no long
aa, but length arises in an interesting way. Vowels once separated by /x/, like in /kaxan/,
find themselves side by side when Mongolic loses its medial /x/. And then, soon, instead of pronouncing two a-a, this
becomes one long /aː/. In its grammar, typical for the area, nouns have a lot of case suffixes. Pronouns have cased forms. There are no genders-slash-classes. And plurals - plural endings - they're kind of optional. Ooh, and you aren't restricted to just one
case ending! Try out double declensions, like in this ablative
dative: you're coming from at home. Verbs have a range of finite suffixes for
past versus non-past tenses. Actually, that's deceptive, they're more tense-aspect
bundles. (Oh, you remember aspect, right? If not, watch this after.) Participles and converbs play useful roles
that could get us into a whole grammar lesson, but just know that if you wanted to turn your
Middle Mongol action, say you rode a horse, into a noun for "the horseriding" or adverb
"after horseriding", Mongolic suffixes have you covered. Basic sentences have a subject, object, and
verb last, also typical for this part of the world. This rigidified over time; Middle Mongol looks
like it was sometimes flexibile enough to put verbs before its objects. Suffixes and postpositions are of course the
order of the day, so "under the table" is really "table under". This old language changed. It branched out. I'll show that using a family tree, but as
I do keep in mind that the tree's branches share traits that bleed into each other at
the edges, and areally in certain regions branching is not neat and discrete like this. The central core took on its characteristics
early. It evolved in a part of the world where vowels
harmonize, and one way it participated in this is with a phenomenon called "breaking", turning
/i/ into a diphthong that pulls in the sound of a nearby vowel, like say /ja/. Also, although central speakers lost /x/,
they recreated one by softening /k/ to /x/. The word köke shifted to xöx. They also started pronouncing ns as engs at
the end of words, so early /kaxan/ becomes /kaan/ which becomes /xaaŋ/. And there's that soft k again. And a long vowel! The biggest representative of the central
branch is the Khalkh dialect, the basis of standard Mongolian. Khalkh picked up some of its own traits that
distinguish it from other central members, like its standout l sound, /ɮ/, and the pronunciation
of short /e/ as /i/. Put changes together and you can figure out
why the old word written /kele/ now sounds like standard Mongolian /xiɮ/. This isn't the only variety of what one of
my sources calls "Mongol proper", which includes much of Inner Mongolia, China as well. Despite small differences, together, these
retain the highest percentage of inherited Mongolic vocabulary in the whole family. Other languages are central members, too,
like Buryat preserves the old participles
and converbs, but it has its own innovations, like turning /s/ into aitch, /h/, so /saŋ/
becomes /haŋ/. They show an Eastern/Western split, for example,
in how restricted the change from k to x is too. The Oirat live out west. They developed their own less ambiguous take
on the Mongol script called the Clear Script. A form of Oirat migrated even further west
and became the language of Kalmykia, sometimes touted as the only natively Mongolic-speaking
and Buddhist region in Europe. Unlike other central languages, Oirat speakers
have not merged final n and ŋ, a retention shared by Ordos. The uniqueness of one central language has
only been recognized in recent times. The bilingual Khamnigan community was long
labeled by their other Tungusic language or just as Buryat. But their Mongolic tongue stands alone. It lacks almost all of the sound changes that
distance them from Middle Mongol. In this respect, they speak by far the least
changed Mongolic language! We've journeyed outside of Mongolic's center
geographically but not yet linguistically. So head south to the Qinghai-Gansu complex. This area is home to the least-understood
part of the family. Languages here have interacted with Turkic,
Bodic, Sinitic and changed rapidly in the process. Pick up a grammar to learn more, but here
are two sample features from one language. Devoiced vowels, like in /ɕu̥'tɕun/. Too subtle for you? Ok, subjective versus objective verb marking,
which allows you to distance the agent from the action or explicitly assert more control. That southern complex sure is complex, but another
less-known branch is (or was) over here on its own: Moghol. Despite its backbone of Mongolic vocabulary
and grammar, it took on Indo-European words and features under the influence of Iranian. In a family all about postpositions, it developed
prepositions, even taking its dative case suffix and turning it around into a new preposition! The final branch we'll meet is across the
family to the east. We saw how the old language was losing both
of its /x/s in the word for "red". Mongolic got rid of middle /x/, paving way
for long vowels. But not everyone erased it from the start. One rare language that preserves it is Daur. It also stands out for another reason. A fifth of its vocabulary has unknown origins,
not Mongolic, not neighbor languages. This drives suspicion that these words derive
from one ancient source, so it gets brought in to help recover this unclear pre-Mongolic
language. Last time I got animated about how efforts
to decipher these two separate scripts are beginning to reveal Khitan. Though hundreds of years older, it has many
related words and features. But it seems parallel to and not part of Mongolic
itself. For one tiny example, the word for "dog" has
a palatal /ɲ/ that is nowhere in Mongolic, even in the earliest Written Mongol. In one northern dialect of Manchu, descendant
of the ancient Jurchen who heavily interacted with pre-Mongolic people, numbers in the teens
sound close to but not quite Mongolic enough to be Mongolic. Other possible, hopeful links are being made
using the brief ancient evidence available to propose the faintest outlines of a Xiānbēi
or Serbi family. Now about this whole branching tree. As the family drifted apart, each member in
its own way, many continuing to be named reflexes of the word "Mongol", I mentioned that the
branches get messy and bleed into each other. Well then, should we even be describing Mongolic
with a tree at all? Would it be better to talk about waves of
spreading changes, with a wave model? Or maybe an onion model, with a core of Mongol
proper peeling into layers of languages to the west, east and south? However you peel the Mongolic onion, unless
you're into Altaic, this is as far as we go, and where our journey ends. I haven't animated one of these expansive
linguistic tours in a while. Let me know what you think, share, rewatch
and enjoy, and stick around and subscribe for language.
