6

jesdügäär sar

2010

Saiga antelope

Traditionally the Ural-Altaic family label has served as a convenient catch-all for just about any Old World language scholars couldn't otherwise classfy. These spanned Finnish and Estonian; the dialects of Saami (formerly Lapp); Hungarian; the Turkic languages (Turkish, Tatar, Uzbek, Kazakh, etc.); pretty much anything spoken in Siberia; Mongolian; and even Korean, Japanese, and Ainu. Very few still subscribe to this all-in-one concept nowadays, pretty well convinced that many of the similarities between those languages could just as easily arise from borrowing and coincidence as from common ancestry.

Mongolian belongs to the new, fit-and-trim Altaic. It has about 5.7 million speakers, 2.3 million of those in Mongolia and actually more, about 3.3 million, in China. Most in Mongolia are bilingual with Russian, though English has been gaining ground since the Soviet breakup.

Mongolian builds words up, in a big way, with multiple suffixes. Next, whereas English sentence order tends toward subject-verb-object, Mongolian uses subject-object-verb: “I horse rode.” The language also observes vowel harmony. This means that vowels fall into two classes, feminine and masculine, plus neutral. A word can have only the feminine or masculine kind, not both, with the neutral a wildcard. Mongolian’s feminine vowels are E (as in pet), U (flute), and Ö (like the German ö in schöne); its masculine, A (father), Ü (as in the German grün), and O (cope). The neutral is I (machine).

Doubling a vowel stretches its duration. Gs are hard and C is always the ch sound in cherry, often printed with a háček [č] to emphasize that. J takes the sound of s in measure. Rs are trilled and an apostrophe (ь in Cyrillic) indicates a little glide after the preceding consonant.

When most people think of written Mongolian — most non-Mongolians, anyway — they recall its unique looping vertical script. This is called Classic and came about around 1204 when Ghengis Khan captured a Uyghur scribe named Tatar-Tonga and set him to the task. Fifty years later Khubilai Khan hired a Tibetan lama named Matidhvaja Sribhadra to devise what’s known as the Phagspa script, which he based on Tibetan. Between the 13th and 15th centuries other Mongolian scribes used the Arabic alphabet. By 1700 three more scripts had arrived: the Clear, the Soyombo, and the Horizontal Square. In 1941 the Mongolians switched to the Roman alphabet, but as Soviet influence grew all-encompassing they switched yet again — to the Cyrillic. To this day Mongolians overwhelmingly perfer Cyrillic, though a minority can still use the Classic script.

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