A sprachbund is a group of languages that share features resulting to geographical proximity and language contact. They may or may not be related. Such features often give the false appearance of relatedness.
One such instance of a sprachbund creating a false appearance of relatedness is between Mongolic and Turkic. The Mongolic language family includes…
- Mongolian / монгол хэл / mongol khel of Mongolia
- Buryat / буряад хэлэн / buryaad khelen of Buryatia, Russia
- Oirat / oirat kelen, including Kalmyk Oirat / Хальмг Өөрдин келн / Haľmg Öördin keln, of Central Asia
- Moghol / Mogholi of Herat, Afghanistan
Meanwhile in Mongolian:
- Khün bür törzh mendlekhee erkh čölöötei, adilkhan ner törtei, izhil erkhtei baidag. Oyuun ukhaan nandin čanar zayaasan khün gegč öör khoorondoo akhan düügiin üzel sanaagaar khar’tsakh učirtai. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
- Sain baina uu / Hello
- Bayartai / Goodbye
- Bayarlalaa / Thank you
- Uuchlaarai / I’m sorry
- tiim / yes
- ugui / no
- khin / man
- emergtei khin / woman
- neg 1
- khoyor 2
- gurav 3
- doröv 4
- tav 5
- zurgaa 6
- doloo 7
- naym 8
- yös 9
- arav 10
- Mogul is a word in English we have borrowed from Mongolian, meaning ‘powerful person’, from Persian and Arabic mughal, mughul, alteration of Mongol.
I ascertain Mongolian to be an Oriental language, alongside Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Japanese and Korean. Together they are the “Efficient” Tongues. They all buzz about (“elemental”) efficiency or something related…
The four layers of Mongol:
- butemzh • accomplishment
- negtgekh • unity
- Mongolianness
- adaptability, flow, fluidity, continuity, versatility
Mongolian is the Language of Commitment, a very potent Super-Tongue, and one of the world’s five most superior tongues.
For millennia, the Mongols have lived alongside and collaborated with neighbouring Turkic peoples in Central Asia. A massive Turkic-Mongolic sprachbund formed as a result of the intertwinement, culminating in the establishment of the Mongolian empire which reportedly saw the slaughter of tens of millions of Turkic people at the hands of Genghis Khan’s warriors from the 13th century. As a result of Turkic cultural influence, the Mongolian language has absorbed a lot of “Turkicity”. As a result of Mongolian domination, the Turkic languages became discernibly “Mongolised”. Both groupings also exhibit noteworthy Muslim influence, but that is not particularly relevant here.
Meanwhile in Kyrgyz…
- Bardık adamdar öz bedelinde jana ukuktarında érkin jana teñ ukuktuu bolup jaralat. Alardın añ-sezimi menen abiyiri bar jana biri-birine bir tuugandık mamile kıluuga tiyiş. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
- Men seni süyöm I love you
- Kim telefon çaldı, ata? Who telephoned dad?
- Üç çını çay içti. He drank three glasses of tea
~Don’t see it.~
I don’t think the Turkic languages are related to the Mongolic languages. I think they belong to a separate Turkic primary family, being the “Gracious” Tongues.
Yet they are often classified as related under the Altaic language grouping. This proposed family generally consists of the Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus languages. Some have gone so far as to further incorporate Japanese and Korean. The map at the head of this post shows the distribution of: Turkic, Mongolic, Tungus, Koreanic, Japonic, and Ainu. The Altaic languages show noteworthy similarities in vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structure, and certain phonological features. It is believed that the Altaic protolanguage originated on the steppes of the region of the Altai Mountains in Siberia. Regardless of wide acceptance, the proposed Altaic familial grouping is still regarded as a hypothesis yet to be proven. Some scholars accept it, others reject it.
I don’t believe in it. Like the latter group of scholars, I believe the commonalities to be the result borrowings and areal convergence, via historic sprachbunds.
Structural similarities and some similarities in vocabulary have supposedly been identified between the Altaic and Uralic languages; between Altaic, Korean, and Japanese, and, on the basis of sound correspondences, between Altaic and Korean – widely understood to have been proved. Structural similarities – what, because they’re all agglutinating?! No, there has to be more. Agglutination is a feature any language can have actively chosen to adopt or pick up, independent of genealogy, like noun gender. An entire primary language family can’t just exist merely on the basis of a structural parallel of agglutination.
With regard to phonology, the shared tendency towards simple sound systems between the Altaic languages is simply something they have all picked up from contact with the phenomenon of “Turkicity”, which was founded upon neutralistic phonetics. Regardless, syllables are usually open, ending in a vowel, with the pattern of consonant-vowel (CV). Clustering of consonants is unusual, and relatively few consonants are deployed.
Two kinds of sound harmony are exhibited: palatal or labial. In palatal vowel harmony, all the vowels of a word must be back or they are all front. Front velar consonants /k g/ may occur only with front vowels, and back (deep) velar consonants /q g/ only with back vowels. Palatal vowel harmony has been weakened throughout the Altaic grouping. Then we have labial (rounding) vowel harmony. In Turkic languages a high vowel agrees in rounding with the vowel of the immediately preceding syllable: in Turkish el-in “hand’s” (‘hand-[genitive]’) but köy-ün “village’s.” In the Mongolic languages, non-high vowels are unrounded, except when following a non-high rounded vowel in the immediately preceding syllable: in Khalkha ger-ees “from the house” (‘house-[ablative]’), ötsögdr-öös “from yesterday.”
A primary language family founded upon a predilection for sound harmony? Hmm. No, to me that is far too trivial!
Don’t be falsely allured by the Turkicity, is what I have to say.
The Buzz-Concept Project 