Proto-Mongolic
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Proto-Mongolic is the hypothetical ancestor language of the modern Mongolic languages. It is very close to the
Middle Mongol language Middle Mongol or Middle Mongolian, was a Mongolic koiné language spoken in the Mongol Empire. Originating from Genghis Khan's home region of Northeastern Mongolia, it diversified into several Mongolic languages after the collapse of the empire ...
, the language spoken at the time of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Most features of modern Mongolic languages can thus be shown to descend from Middle Mongol. An exception would be the Common Mongolic pluritative voice suffix ''-cAgA-'' 'do together', which can be reconstructed from the modern languages but is not attested in Middle Mongol. Regarding the time period when Proto-Mongolic was spoken,
Juha Janhunen Juha Janhunen (born 12 February 1952 in Pori, Finland) is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994 he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork on ...
writes: "The absolute dating of Proto-Mongolic depends on when, exactly, the linguistic unity of its speakers ended", that is, when it evolved into separate Mongolic languages; this event took place "only after the geographical dispersal of the ancient Mongols under Chinggis Khan", which was "not earlier than the thirteenth century." As a result, " is means that the present-day differences between the Mongolic languages are likely to be the result of less than 800 years of divergent evolution."


Phonology


Morphology


Plurals

One way in which Proto-Mongolic formed plurals was by adding -s or -ud to a word. -s would be added to words ending in vowels, for example ''ere'' (man) would become ''eres. -''ud would be added to words ending in consonants, for example ''nom'' (book) would become ''nomud''. However, for words ending with the consonant n, l, or r would lose the final letter, and just add d, for example ''kan'' (prince) would become ''kad'' (princes).


Lexicon


Notes


References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mongolic Languages Agglutinative languages Mongolic languages Proto-languages