Talk:Mongolian language

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Hi Whimemsz!

I've just seen the changes of the Mongolian language side, and they are not all for the better. On the one hand it now (as intended) focuses exclusively on Halh (thy Khalkha) and the only word that was intended to be a transcription of the Mongolian script is transcribed in a wrong way (in <Monggol> the second <g> would have to be a Greek gamma). This is not really justified as the number of speakers in Inner Mongolia is either equal or even surpasses the number of Halh speakers. (You would of course propose that Inner Mongolia is divided into Ordos, Chahar etc., but that still leaves the fact that the majority of those 5.7 million speakers do not speak Halh.) But most curiously, reading the IPA of the Cyrillic letters, I am rather reminded of the Inner Mongolian pronunciation. For as to phonemes, the Halh dialect has no voiced labial or dental plosives, and the same is true of the affricates. The contrast is instead achieved by aspiration, such that the allegedly voiced phonemes go unaspired: д is /t/, т is /th/ etc. (The h of th should be put up.) For more details see “Svantesson et alii (2005): The phonology of Mongolian. New York: Oxford University Press” that deals extensively with Halh, but with diachronics of Mongolic as well.

The worst thing about the side is that we still don’t learn anything about phonology (except a hint at phonemes: you list just one single /g/; you wouldn’t be understood, e.g. bag “team”, baG “small”), morphology, syntax, vocabulary etc. Most basically, it would have to be said that Mongolic has vocal harmony, that it is agglutinating (suffixes only) and that word order is SOV. There are lots of interesting aspects as well, e.g. case system, postpositions, verbal system (verbal nouns, converbs, finite verbs; mode, evidentialis) and of course word classes (I wouldn’t trust Poppe in that respect), but I know quite well that no book available (at least as the English reader is concerned) is reliable enough. If this didn’t discourage you, you might try to use “Juha Yanhunen (ed.) (2003): The Mongolic language. London: Routledge” as a basis. If I am to find the time, I might deal with these subjects myself, but for the time being, that three most basic aspects of grammar and a change of a bunch of IPA entries should suffice. If you provide me with your email, I could mail you the transcription list of Svantesson et alii.

Thank you for your observations. I have to say right from the start that I know hardly anything about Mongolian -- the little I do know comes mainly from a Lonely Planet guide, which I'm sure isn't the most reliable of sources. But I saw that there was hardly any information at all on this page, so I decided (perhaps mistakenly), that it would be better to add SOMEthing. I'll try to see if I can pick up some of those books soon, and try to fix the article as soon as I can. I don't really know what to do in the meantime, so if you or anyone else who knows Mongolian wanted to help fix my screwups, that would be fantastic... Thanks again for the references and the advice! --Whimemsz 02:12, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC) ((By the way, you can just use my Wikipedia userpage to get my email address))

I think this page and the discussion could be useful : French Wikipedia, though there are many mistake in the pages.

--Henri de Solages 02:12, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I’m just wondering what good there might be in adding „useful phrases“ to a lexicon entry. Anyway, they’d rather be consistent with either the transcription or with phonetics. Neither is the case. E.g. something like “bayarlaa” is said, but the transcription is “bayarlalaa” and the API-standard would look slightly different as well. There are a good number of mistakes as well, e.g. “oroslar” (orosoor), “a lot – tom” (“a lot” is ikh, “tom” is “large”), “down – doo” (which is correct, strictly speaking, but “doo” can never be used without one of the suffixes –r and –sh). So I think it would be best to altogether abandon this section.

And in any case, why are the phrases at the very bottom of the article? Shouldn't they be just before the references and external links sections? Being at the very bottom sort of detracts from the overall layout, at least for me, since I feel like sections like "references" and "external links" and so forth should be at the very bottom... --Whimemsz 01:16, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Observations / Sergey Radchenko 2 Transcription for Mongolian 3 Recent changes 4 Cyrllic vs. Roman 5 no /k/? 6 no /b/? 7 Palatalization 8 Morphology 9 Altaic Controversy

[edit] Observations / Sergey Radchenko

The article is a bit weak both on the theoretical side, and in practical examples. On the theoretical side, it would be nice to see more discussion of the links between Mongolian and Buryat / Kalmyk languages, more thorough analysis of grammar and writing. It would be useful also to compare Inner Mongolian vocabulary with Khalkh Mongolian, as there are substantial differences. It should be pointed out, too, that in Inner Mongolia very few people will actually speak Mongolian, at least in towns. Of course, their road signs are in Mongol bichig, but who can read them?

On the examples side, the "useful phrases" are fairly misleading. As one commentator noted, there is little regard here for spelling rules. But in any case, as long as the average tourist out there can benefit from it. I also found a few mistakes in the actual phrases, corrected those - but there are quite a bit more mistakes, so I just gave up on this for now.

Maybe it would be worth getting a native Mongolian speaker (preferably a linguist) to go through this article and offer corrections. Anyone knows of one?

[edit] Transcription for Mongolian

I have posted a request for opinions about a standard transcription table for mongolian on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Cyrillic)#Transcription_for_Mongolian. Please join the discussion there. --Latebird 20:57, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent changes

Recent changes

While adding the grammar part (except phonology), I’ve taken away the list of “useful phrases” the use of which didn’t become clear at all. I didn’t insert any hyperlinks, thus a helping hand to put this right would be welcome. Furthermore, my English is rather mediocre, and while this text has been checked by one doctor of Mongolian studies and linguistics, no native speaker of English has read it through so far.

I disagree with Sergey Radchenko that a comparision to Buryat/Kalmuck would’ve been helpful, as both are not to be regarded as parts of Central Mongolian, but as independent languages within the Mongolic language family. However, South Central Mongolian lexical items (as well as phonology and other grammar, for that matter) would have their merits, preferably with a little information about the development of the Proto-Mongolic sound system.

And either Buryat is a related language or a dialect! Thus we shouldn’t extend “Mongolian”’s geographical distribution to Buryatia, or at the least we shouldn’t talk about significant numbers. G Purevdorj 14:18, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cyrllic vs. Roman

This article about a language I'm interested in has been vastly improved lately with the addition of a wealth of grammtical, phonological, and syntactic information, and the deletion of the "useful phrases." I have a suggestion that someone might want to think about, though. This is the English langauge version of wikipedia. Most English speakers are illiterate (or in my case, nearly-illiterate) in the Cyrllic alphabet. I can agonize my way through most of it and yeah, it's probably good for me, and yes, I know this is the way Mongolian is written, but the bottom line is, I don't know the words I'm looking at. I have to take som much time to figure out what I'm looking at that it gets in the way of my grasping the grammatical examples. I would understand them so much more quickly if they were Romanized. No reason you couldn't display sample sentences in both alphabets. I realize wikipedia isn't all about me, but I'm sure i'm not the only one in this boat. If you follow my suggestion, thanks. If not, thanks at least for considering it. C.M.71.215.128.134 18:04, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Cyrillic can be learned within a couple of hours and is certainly wholesome, but as this should also be a text for people with no particular interest in Mongolian, here you are. The downside is that I had to choose a more precise transcription that is less intuitive to English readers. G Purevdorj 22:51, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! And I like the more accurate, less "Englishy" looking approach.

[edit] no /k/?

the phonology says that Mongolian doesn't have /k/, but it does have /g/... is that true?! I was under the impression that was impossible. --Krsont 19:27, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

[k] turned into [x] and, well, was absent from then on. (In some Northern dialects we still have an allophon [k] of /x/ with non-pharyngeal vowels.) Now in loanwords from Russian, [k] is reintroduced and might already be considered a marginal phoneme again. G Purevdorj 22:18, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] no /b/?

It also says Mongol lacks /b/. What about the city of Ulaanbaatar? or the fellow who gave me a ride to Khatgal: Batbayaar? C.M.65.102.39.98 20:56, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

The phonology section only describes the most prevelant dialect of Mongolian, Halh, which, from what I understand, does not have a voiced labial plosive (/b/). The letter for /b/ is pronounced /p/ in this dialect. Other dialects do have the /b/ phoneme.--WilliamThweatt 21:19, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, my impression was that /b/ was a pretty prominent phoneme. Not saying you're wrong, I'm just surprised, but you seem pretty confident in saying that. So, Ulaanpaatar? C.M.65.102.39.98 19:07, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, I am trained in linguistics, but will admit I know very little about Mongolian. However, I do know that the situation is very complicated by many factors including the many different dialects, the isolation of the communities of speakers of the different dialects, the separation of Mongolia into "Outer Mongolia" which is heavily influence by Russian and "Inner Mongolia" which is heavily influenced by Mandarin Chinese, and the use of different writing systems over the centuries and in different communities. With all that in mind, ancient Mongolian did have the /b/ phoneme. That is why it is present in placenames and in the "alphabets". Over time, /b/ has come to be pronounced as /p/ in some dialects, as an intermediate between /w/ and /b/ (bilabial continuant) in others, and retained as /b/ in yet others. As for prominence, speakers of dialects which keep the /b/ (or something close to it) may indeed outnumber those of dialect which do not -- however, the "standard" or "prestige" dialect is based on Halh, which, according to all my sources does not have /b/.--WilliamThweatt 21:13, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't actively speak the language, but I hear it a lot. From my non-linguistic experience, the b in eg. Ulaanbaatar is proncounced very similarly to the pronounciation in English. That's also the comparison that you'll find in most teaching literature. I may not understand the difference correctly, but my impression was that it's rather the /p/ that is missing. --Latebird 07:23, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I guess there are two reasons why /p/ frequently appears to you like [b]. Firstly, if you’re German or the like, your own mother tongue almost always combines the features voicedness and aspiration to differentiate between /b/ and /ph/ (meant to be one phoneme), and there is even data suggesting that aspiration is more important. Thus, you would map [p] onto /b/. Secondly, Svantesson et al. (“The phonology of Mongolian”, 2005) didn’t take into account any contextually motivated voicing. Therefore, <Ulaanbaatar> might have [b], because it is preceded by a (voiced) nasal, but <baatar> has [p]. G Purevdorj 23:39, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Palatalization

Why are the palatalized consonants considered separate phonemes? Is there any difference between a palatalized consonant and a consonant + y? i.e. is "ty" a palatalized t? If so, isn't this just a cluster?65.102.39.98 19:07, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Palatal consonant is an article here that may answer your question. Briefly though, "palatization" is used in linguistics to describe the "place of articulation" (the palate, as opposed to dental, aveolar, retroflex, etc). A palatal /t/ is articulated with the blade of the tongue against the palate, while a dental /t/ is articulated with the tongue against the back of the upper teeth. This is a single sound (phoneme). In linguistics, "ty" would indicate two seperate phonemes pronounced in sucsession (written in IPA as /tj/)--WilliamThweatt 21:20, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Morphology

I've read a little bit about linguistics, but I know too little of that (and nothing of Mongolian) to contribute anything of substance to this article. However, I believe that the morphology section needs to be revised: it seems to contain a talk-page-style argument. Seeing a "(still?)" and similar notes doesn't make it appear very accurate to me Nyttend 20:44, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I dislike to speak about abstractions roughly depicted by one single example. However, I shall refute the single point that you directly critizised. Grammaticalization may turn proper nouns to demonstrative pronouns to personal pronouns. Now, it isn't clear at all if the Mongolian demonstrative pronouns still necessarily exhibit any demonstrative meaning or if they have already become (distal and proximal) personal pronouns. There are linguists who argue for the latter, such as Sechenbaatar. Yet, this position has not been that well established yet. So I wrote down the more conservative opinion and inserted the "(still?)" to make sure that nobody too readily relies on this data. Another point that you "might" have critizised is, for example, "(probably perfective, otherwise past)". We do not have any sufficient analysis of the Mongolian aspect system. Uwe Bläsing provided one for Kalmyk, and though this has not been adapted to Mongolian proper, some similarities between the two languages clearly show that some points of the nowadays commonly held beliefs about certain Mongolian suffixes are highly likely wrong. Thus it had to be put more ambivalently in order not to imply knowledge that doesn't exist (if we set certain scientific standards). G Purevdorj 14:09, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Altaic Controversy

According to major reference works, everbody agrees on Turkic, Tungus, and Mongolian families. These language families have some common words and they are typologically similar. Whether they are genetically related or not is the subject of ongoing research. The similarities could be result of long-term contact.

All languages are influenced by languages they are in contact with. According to the standards set by linguists, languages that make up a family must show productive-predictive correspondences. The shape of a given word in one language should be predictable from the shape of the corresponding word, or cognate, in another language. Turkic, Tungus, and Mongolian satisfies all these similarities.

I do not agree with the idea that the Altaic controversy necessitates total abandonation of the Altaic.

The family name "Altaic" is a commonly used terminology to label these languages. Turkic, Tungus, and Mongolian are still Altaic regardless of exact status of Altaic is. The dispute is a minor issue among a small circle of specialists. Furthermore, even these specialists use the term Altaic to label, especially, for these three language groups. e104421 11 September 2006, 18:40 (UCT)

Three things:

• It is very hard to assume good faith for your edits when you interpret "take it to the talk page" to mean "force my change through again after it's been reverted by two different people, then go make a post on the talk page".
• Also please be aware of the three reverts rule if you are not already so. I will not revert you again and tempt you to make a third revert which would get you banned, but someone else may.
• I consider references to specifically-named scholars and their work (e.g. Starostin, his Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages, and the critical reviews it received) to be more reliable than a generalist reference like Ethnologue.

As for the actual issue at hand, I'll leave that to the rest of y'all. cab 01:18, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

The first time you deleted the Altaic Languages and the Ethnologue reference, I assumed good faith, reverted it, and summarized in the edit comments the reason for the reversion. When you came back and made the same edit again, with no comment on the talk page, not only about deleting but also Altaic controversy, just erasing the Altaic languages link and also Ethnologue reference, my good faith went out the window. There is already an informative paragraph at the Altaic Languages page about the controversy, that's the reason why i already put that link there in the table. I also aware of the three reverts rule. First you removed the link and the reference without any warning by reverting the article.e104421

The page as it was in its original state did not advocate "total abandonation" of the Altaic. (Nor did any other pages you have been editing to advance your pro-Altaic bias). It merely stated the Language family as "Altaic (disputed)", which is perfectly understandable since "A language family is a group of genetically related languages" and the validity of Altaic as a genetic grouping (rather than a sprachbund, areal grouping, or whatever) is disputed in many reliable sources. We do not want to hide the fact that this dispute exists or imply that Altaic as a genetic grouping is undisputed; nor do we want to devote undue space to the controversy, since it's already written about elsewhere on Wikipedia. So the single word "disputed" is in my mind, the best solution, rather than a link to an external source. No one disputes the fact that Mongolian is referred to an "Altaic language". But many people also refer to Persian as a "Middle Eastern language" along with Arabic and Hebrew, or talk about the hanzi-using languages as "CJK(V) languages". That does not make "Middle Eastern language" or "CJK(V) language" a valid genetic classification. cab 11:04, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

The main problem is related with the "(disputed)" tag, cause this leads misunderstanding. There exists Altaic Languages but whether they are genetically related or not is the subject of ongoing research. The family name "Altaic" is a commonly used terminology to label these languages. This "(disputed)" tag causes confusion such as "--- language's being Altaic is disputed". For this reason, i'm supporting to remove the "(disputed)" tag. The discussion should be done either in the Altaic Languages page or maybe better in the Altaic hypothesis page. That's why i put the link to Altaic languages in the table. I'm not trying to promote anything just to prevent misunderstanding. e104421

The current indexing solution is not the best I could think of, but it is hardly worth disputing, as long as the "(disputed)" remains. As to the previous comment: Of course scientists (including those opposed to Altaic) sometimes use the label "Altaic" to refer to a sprachbund or the like, but they do so with an eye on the ongoing discussion. And if scientists use such a label they are aware of its faults - for those who propose a sprachbund for this area wouldn't limit it to members of Mongolic, Turkic etc - but nonscientists probably aren't. So it is not a question of how to define "Altaic" so that it is a scientifically useful label - if genetically it isn't, it won't be in any other respect as well. G Purevdorj 12:27, 25 September 2006 (UTC)