What unites Afghanistan, China, Mongolia and Russia? Language. I use the Mongolian language not only in the state of the same name. We will talk about its range 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 one. Linguists claim that the Mongolian languages fell apart as early as the 5th century AD.
Some researchers suggest the existence of the Altaic family, which included the Mongolian languages along with the Turkic, Tungus-Manchurian, Korean. Their opponents believe that the similarity of these languages is due to close ties between the population, and not to 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 the written language of the Tuvans, the indigenous population of Tuva.
The following is a brief list of languages belonging to this group:
| Language | people | Area |
| Buryat | Buryats | Republic of Buryatia in Russia, Inner Mongolia in China |
| Kalmyk | Kalmyks | Republic of Kalmykia in Russia |
| Baoan | baoan | PRC |
| Dagrusky | dagurs | PRC |
| Mughal | Afghans | Afghanistan |
| Shira Yugur | yugu | PRC |
| Hamnigansky | hamnigans | PRC, Mongolia, Russia (southeast of Baikal) |
Mongolian language
Mongolian is the official language of the State of Mongolia. The term can also be used in a broader sense. It can designate the language of the Autonomous Region of the People's Republic 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 western, central and eastern branches of dialects that 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 Mongolian is often called the Khalkha-Mongolian language. In Inner Mongolia, nothere is a main dialect, so the inhabitants of this area use the traditional script.
Classification based on Altaic theory:
| Family | Altai |
| Branch | Mongolian |
| Group | Northern Mongolian |
| Subgroup | Central Mongolian |
The long 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 Turkic. But in fact they are different, even though there are many Turkic borrowings in Mongolian.
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).
Actually, the Mongolian language differs from other representatives of the branch in that it lacks personal-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.
Word order is strictly predetermined, unlike Russian. Here the dependent word is placed before the main word. By rearranging the words a little, you can get a completely different sentence. At the beginning arecircumstances 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 is a common literary old written Mongolian language. It will be divided into several periods: ancient (from XIII), preclassical (from XV) and classical (XVII-XX). At the same time, ten different writing systems were used in the 13th century. The classic version is still used in China, the rest are reflected in other languages.
The old written language Mongolian is gradually decreasing its range, narrowing towards the eastern part of Mongolia and the province of China. This was influenced by the artificial creation of pure writing, which was adapted to the Oirat dialect. At that time, the Buryats developed their own script based on the traditional language.
Mongolian has had several alphabets for a long time. In the 20th century, in an attempt to consolidate them, they wanted to translate writing into Latin. But in 1945, the alphabet began to be written in Cyrillic letters.
Mongolian words
Now the Cyrillic alphabet is used in Mongolia, the alphabet of the language has 35 letters.
It is quite difficult to briefly demonstrate the construction of phrases in Mongolian, but it is quite possible to show some words. Examples are shown in the following table.
| Sambainu | Hello |
| B | I |
| Chi | You |
| Heng? | Who? |
| Yamar? | Which one? |
| Haana? | Where? |
| Bayarlaa | Thank you |
| Amgtai | Delicious |
| Moore | Cat |
| Nohoy | Dog |
| bairt(x)E | Goodbye |
