Mongolian: characteristic, features, words

What unites Afghanistan, China, Mongolia and Russia? Language. The Mongolian language is used not only in the state of the same name. About its range and features, we'll talk in the article.

Language family

The name "Mongolian" combined several languages that belong to the same family. They are closely related, because once they were a single whole. Linguists argue that the Mongolian languages disintegrated as far back as the 5th century AD.

Some researchers suggest the existence of an Altaic family, into which the Mongolian languages were included along with the Turkic, Tungus, Manchurian, and Korean languages. Their opponents believe that the similarity of these languages, due to close ties between the population, rather than a 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 for Tuvanians - the indigenous population of Tuva.

Below is a short list of languages belonging to this group:

The language is Mongolian

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 have relation 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 the dialects, which differ mainly phonetically. The most common is the Khalkha dialect, which is part of the central group. It built the literary and official language of Mongolia, because of which the Mongolian is often called Khalkha-Mongolian. In Inner Mongolia there is no main dialect, therefore inhabitants of this territory use traditional writing.

Classification based on the Altai theory:

The prolonged existence of a joint Mongol-Turkic association was reflected in the language. Because of their similarity, some people are convinced that the Mongolian language is Türkic. But in reality they are different, although there are a lot of Turkic loans in Mongolian.

Features of grammar

Languages are agglutinative. That is, different speech formants (suffixes and prefixes) are "strung" one on another, thereby changing the meaning of the phrase. However, in this family there are separate elements of inflection (changes in the endings of words).

Actually, the Mongolian language differs from other branches of the branch in that it lacks personally-predicative particles. In the rest they are quite similar. This group is characterized by the use of impersonal conjugations, and personal and impersonal pronouns are expressed by suffixes.

The order of words is strictly predetermined, unlike the Russian. Here the dependent word is placed before the main one. Slightly rearranging the words in places, you can get a completely different proposal. At 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 12th century there was a single common-Mongolian one. Approximately from XIII to XVII century there is a common literary old-written Mongolian language. It will be divided into several periods: ancient (from XIII), pre-classical (from XV) and classical (XVII-XX). At the same time, in the 13th century, ten different writing systems were used. The classical version is still used in the PRC, the rest are reflected in other languages.

The old-written Mongolian language gradually reduces its range, tapering to the eastern part of Mongolia and the province of China. It was influenced by the artificial creation of a clean letter, which was adapted to the Oirat dialect. At that time the Buryats had their own written language, based on the traditional language.

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

Mongolian: words

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

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