Mongolian language: characteristics, features, words

What unites Afghanistan, China, Mongolia and Russia? Tongue. I use the Mongolian language not only in the state of the same name. We will talk about its area and features in the article.

Language family

The name "Mongolian" combines several languages ​​that belong to the same family. They are closely related, because once they were a single whole. Linguists claim that the Mongolian languages ​​fell apart in the 5th century AD.

Some researchers suggest the existence of an Altai family, into which the Mongolian languages ​​belonged to the Turkic, Tungus-Manchurian, Korean. Their opponents believe that the similarity of these languages ​​is due to close ties between the population, and not their common origin.

In any case, the distribution area of ​​the Mongolian language family is very wide. It covers the territory of Mongolia, Afghanistan, the northeastern provinces of China and the Volga region of Russia. Until 1940, the Mongolian language served as a written language among the Tuvans, the indigenous population of Tuva.

The following is a brief list of languages ​​that belong to this group:

Mongolian language

Mongolian is the official language of the state of Mongolia. The term can be used in a broader sense. It can denote the language of the autonomous region of China - Inner Mongolia, and also be related to modern and ancient groups of languages.

The population that speaks it is 5.8 million people. It includes the western, central and eastern branches of dialects, which differ mainly phonetically. The most common is the Khalkha dialect, which is part of the central group. The literary and official language of Mongolia is built on it, which is why the Mongolian is often called the Khalkha-Mongolian language. In Inner Mongolia, the main dialect does not exist, therefore, residents of this territory use traditional writing.

Classification based on Altai theory:

The long existence of the joint Mongol-Turkic association was reflected in the language. Due to their similarity, some people are convinced that the Mongolian language is Turkic. But in reality they are different, even though in the Mongolian there are many Turkic borrowings.

Grammar features

Languages ​​are agglutinative. That is, various speech formants (suffixes and prefixes) are “strung” one on top of the other, thereby changing the meaning of the phrase. However, this family has some elements of inflection (changes in word endings).

The Mongolian language itself differs from other representatives of the branch in that it does not contain personally-predicative particles. Otherwise, they are quite similar. This group is characterized by the use of impersonal conjugations, and personal and impersonal pronouns are expressed by suffixes.

The word order is strictly predetermined, unlike Russian. Here the dependent word is placed before the main thing. By rearranging the words a little, you can get a completely different sentence. In the beginning there are circumstances of place and time, and the predicate is placed at the very end.

History

It is assumed that until the XII century there was a single common Mongolian. From about the 13th to the 17th centuries, there was a common literary old script Mongolian language. It will be divided into several periods: ancient (from XIII), preclassical (from XV) and classical (XVII-XX). At the same time, in the 13th century, ten different writing systems were used. The classic version is still used in China, the rest are reflected in other languages.

The ancient scripture language of Mongolian gradually decreases its area, tapering to the eastern part of Mongolia and the province of China. This artificial creation of pure writing, which was adapted to the Oirat dialect, influenced this. At that time, the Buryats formed their own written language based on the traditional language.

Mongolian for a long time had several alphabets. In the XX century, in an attempt to consolidate them, they wanted to translate the written language into Latin. But in 1945, the alphabet began to be written in Cyrillic letters.

Mongolian language: words

Now in Mongolia, Cyrillic is used, the alphabet of the language has 35 letters.

It is quite difficult to briefly demonstrate the compilation of phrases in Mongolian, but it is possible to show some words. Examples are shown in the following table.