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Researchers on proto-Mongolic
Topic Started: Sep 3 2006, 07:17:24 PM (472 Views)
black man
The Right Hand
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Janhunen writes in "The Mongolic Languages" (2003):

Quote:
 
PERIODIZATION

Since Proto-Mongolic is the reconstructed ancestor of the Modern Mongolic languages, it can only contain features that can be induced from the extant language material. The application of internal reconstruction and external comparisons to te Proto-Mongolic corpus do, however, yield limited information also on the stages preceding Proto-Mongolic. These stages may be termed Pre-Proto-Mongolic. (...)

(...) Some of the earlier stages of Pre-Proto-Mongolic can be approached through the analysis of the traces of areal contacts with neighbouring language families, notably Turkic and Tungusic. Also, there is the tantalizing possibility that future research will further increase the time depth of reconstruction by giving us more insights into the Para-Mongolic linguistic diversity that is likely to have coexisted with Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic.

(...) Written Mongol is also likely to preserve traces of the dialectal diversity that actually existed in both Proto-Mongolic and Pre-Proto-Mongolic times. This diversity was extinguished at the level of the spoken language by the ethnic and political (re)unification of the Mongols under Chinggis Khan.

(...) we will never know what the actual degree of diversity was. In any case, wit the the victory of Chinggis Khan, intensive linguistic unification took place, and, as a result, the primary dialects were lost in favour of a more homogeneous Proto-Mongolic language. (...)

(...) Proto-Mongolic is and remains a product of the comparative method and the fact that idioms close to it happen to be recorded in written documents is only of secondary interest from the reconstructive point of view. In this respect, Proto-Mongolic is comparable with any other relatively recent protolanguage which once coexisted with a close-lying literary standard (cf. e.g. the case of Latin vs. Proto-Romance).


sources on proto-Mongolic mentioned by Janhunen:

G.J. Ramstedt (1912, 1952-'66)
Paul Pelliot (1925)
Nicholas Poppe (1955, 1956, 1960, 1962, 1965, 1975, 1976)
Juha Janhunen (1990, 1999)
Masayoshi Nomura (1959)
Shiro Hattori (1970)
Gerhard Doerfer (1969-'74)
Eugene Helimski (1984)
G.D. Sanzheev (1953-'64)
P.A. Darvaev (1988)
A.A. Darbeeva (1996)
Tömörtogoo (1992)
G.C. Pyurbeev (1993)
Michael Weiers (1970)
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