Genghis Khan was an unusual conqueror. Yes, he subdued vast lands from atop a horse, but
he didn't brag loudly across the ages. He kept secrets. A secret history. A secret burial.
No images from his life. Conquered peoples weren't even allowed to learn his language.
With all this secrecy, could we ever know what his language sounded like?
My first encounter with Mongolian. Imagine me working at a coffee shop. For years I spent
my mornings steaming customized espresso elixirs for customers to carry out with style. But
after my shift, I'd relax... by heading three blocks to the library and picking grammars
off the stacks. On this day I noticed a new book.
I opened it and met a language that built words mechanically, that had vowel harmony,
long vowels and an "L" it warned me was tricky to pronounce. Fun! Until one example broke
my flow: something something something... Chinggis Khaan. Suddenly this wasn't just
grammar. It felt like history. Mongolian. Ah, the Mongols! Was this the remnant voice
of the Great Khan himself?
I didn't realize it at the time, but this curiosity would lead me down an epic road:
books, maps, epigraphy late into the night, following nomadic hoofprints to chase a language.
And if you want in on that journey, we travel to Mongolia today.
Fly into Ulaanbaatar, the Red Hero city, and you'll see one name at the airport, on bottles,
a hotel, a bank, and the character atop the world's largest man-on-horse statue southeast
of town: not Genghis Khan but Чингис хаан.
Yes, in Cyrillic. No, this isn't Russian. It's Mongolian. Just like in that grammar.
Endings with vowel harmony, postpositions not prepositions, long vowels like /xaːŋ/,
and Ls and Ls of /ɮ/.
Cross the border into China and you're in Inner Mongolia. As you look around at shops
and signs, it can be hard to imagine that a roving shrine to Genghis Khan once toured
this region for the devout after his death. But focus above the Chinese and you'll spot
some Mongolian. In an older alphabet, with toothy consonant-vowel letters connected along
a cursive spine. It's unique in the way it's written from top to bottom
in rows from left to right.
For beginners, it's a challenging script. I mean, this thing kind of breaks webpages.
But to ease the pain, children here learn it as syllables. When they recite words with
these syllables, something strange happens. Extra unspoken syllables emerge. The word
/xiɮ/: xe-le. Hohhot, the Blue City of Inner Mongolia, is xö-xe-xo-ta. And the four syllables
of Ulaanbaatar are written with six! Where do these extra syllables come from?
From back in time.
1204, before he is Khan, the up-and-coming Temüjin conquers a tribe to the south, the
Naiman. Among his new subjects is a scholar, Tatatungga, who writes in the Uyghur script,
which his people inherited, ultimately from Aramaic. (There's a whole backstory, but if
it reminds you of rotated Arabic, there is a reason.) Temüjin may be illiterate, but
he immediately recognizes the use for his dawning empire. And so trusted Mongol nobles
learn to write.
Later that same century, a great stone goes up with an inscription telling us that a skilled
archer Yesüngge shot a target from 335 alds away, more half a kilometer. The first words
in the text reveal who was there to witness it: Chinggis Khaan and his Mongol dignitaries.
This is preclassical Written Mongol. It often resembles modern Mongolian: a "ger" is still
a "ger". But it preserves sounds that have since changed, like edür has since harmonized
to ödör. Those long vowels were actually two vowels split by /x/: /kʰaxan/ instead
of /xaːŋ/. Which by the way is why "Khan" also gets spelled with two a's and a g between.
This official written language takes us back to the right time, but another line of evidence
suggests it might be suspiciously archaic. How dignitaries wrote
but not how the Khagan spoke.
A crucial piece of the Mongolian story was nearly forgotten: a history book disguised
as a language instruction text was rediscovered by Russian Orthodox monk Palladius in China
in the mid 1800s.
This book was written entirely in Hàn Chinese characters, but despite appearances, it doesn't
make sense if it's read in Chinese. Listen to the very first words: ching-gi-s qa-han.
We meet again.
What emerges is a long name-filled text telling the inside story of the man himself: his origins
from Tengri, his anda (his blood brother), his conquests with his general, struggle for
succession, even a cameo by that same longshot archer. Oh, and time and again you'll read
how when Chinggis Khaan made a decree, he made a decree, saying dotdotdot.
It all struck scholars and nomads alike as authentic, perhaps composed upon his very
death, when nobles gathered to remember his story, their story, and wrote down what came
to be known as nighucha tobchiyan, the Secret History.
It's from the right time, but something felt off. Edür had already changed to üdür.
They were already dropping their middle /x/'s. And yet t hey kept around an initial /x/: xuja'ur.
In all, the Secret History looked different, mostly younger. Maybe Written Mongol was too
old for the language of the Khaghan. Maybe this was his Middle Mongol.
So why not just roll back today's pronunciation and undo sound changes to revert to
our best Middle Mongol accent?
...is the question you ask yourself as we travel the open road through the Ordos in
Inner Mongolia, to the site of the Mausoleum of Chinggis Khaan. "Ordos" became our "horde"
but it means "palaces". His tomb remains a mystery, yet after his death, tent palaces wandered
this land as a shrine to what one scholar terms "Genghisid theology" in Tengriism. A
people called the Darkhad vowed to guard it forever, and their Mongolian is different.
They're not alone. There are languages in Russia that inherit over 90% of their words
from Middle Mongol, while one in China keeps less than half. I promised a lot of wandering,
but the point is there's not one Mongolian. It's a Mongolic family. Even my grammar, naïvely
titled "Mongolian", was teaching just one variety: Khalkha.
Linguists sifted through Mongolic cognates to piece together a common ancestor. Proto-Mongolic
had a /l/ not /ɮ/. It had no f's. The /xaːŋ/ had /k/ not /x/ and final /n/ hadn't merged
with /ŋ/, so they were saying /kaxan/. /x/s were dropping but lingered at the start of
words: ulaan was *xula(x)an. Sometimes evidence conflicts. Was their garb a "depel" or a "dexel"?
Or it reveals quirks. Mongols used echo nouns for "and things like that":
"mori mari" for "horses and more...ses".
It looked so much like Middle Mongol, like another line of evidence pointing back to the exact
same time. Only 800 years ago; that's a very young family compared to
others we've met.
It's hard to reach beyond that. So here he sits. Before him, we detect Turkic loans,
like his very title. Maybe dialects or even a link to this mysterious script. After him,
many Mongolic descendants. And between, a "linguistic bottleneck" caused by a man who
united a people and drew a line in the Gobi sand from which emerged a language family.
Through old texts and modern voices we still hear echoes of when he made a decree, he made
a decree, but without saying the sound /f/. So add his linguistic legacy to the many accomplishments
of a man who to us is Genghis Khan, who in Mongolia is remembered as Chinggis Khaan,
but who in his own tongue may have been Cinggis Kaxan.
Stick around and subscribe for language.