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.