Middle Mongol

Middle Mongol is a Koine from Old Mongol spoken in Mongolian Empire.

Middle Mongol
ꡏꡡꡃꡀꡡꡙ
Native to	Mongolia, China, Russia
Era	Developed into Classical Mongolian by the 17th century
Language family	Mongolic Middle Mongol
Early form	Old Mongol
Writing system	Phagspa script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xng
Linguist List	xng
Glottolog	midd1351

Definition and historical predecessors

The term "Middle Mongol" is somewhat misleading, as what would generally by language naming rules be termed "Old Mongolian" in this terminology is actually Proto-Mongolic. The existence of another ("old") Mongol clan federation in Mongolia during the 12th century is historical, but there is no language material from this period.

According to Vovin (2019), the Rouran language of the Rouran Khaganate was a Mongolic language and close, but not identical, to Middle Mongolian.

Juha Janhunen (2006) classified the Khitan language into the "Para-Mongolic" family, meaning it is related to the Mongolic languages as a sister group, rather than as a direct descendant of Proto-Mongolic. Alexander Vovin has also identified several possible loanwords from Koreanic languages into Khitan. He also identified the extinct Tuyuhun language as another Para-Mongolic language.

Corpus

The temporal delimitation of Middle Mongol causes some problems as shown in definitions ranging from the 13th until the early 15th or until the late 16th century. This discrepancy arises from the lack of documents written in the Mongolian language from between the early 15th and late 16th centuries. It is not clear whether these two delimitations constitute conscious decisions about the classification of e.g. a small text from 1453 with less than 120 words or whether the vaster definition is just intended to fill up the time gap for which little proper evidence is available.

Initial pages of the Secret History of the Mongols published in 1908 by Ye Dehui. The rows with large characters represent Mongolian phonetic transcription in Chinese characters, with the right-hand smaller characters representing the glosses

Yuan era paiza with Middle Mongol inscriptions in Phags-pa script

Gold dinar of the Mongol ilkhan of Persia, Arghun with Middle Mongol legends in Uighur script

Middle Mongol survived in a number of scripts, namely notably ʼPhags-pa (decrees during the Yuan dynasty), Arabic (dictionaries), Chinese, Mongolian script and a few western scripts. UsuallyTemplate:Among whom, the Stele of Yisüngge is considered to be its first surviving monument. It is a sports report written in Mongolian writing that was already fairly conventionalized then and most often dated between 1224 and 1225. However, Igor de Rachewiltz argues that it is unlikely that the stele was erected at the place where it was found in the year of the event it describes, suggesting that it is more likely to have been erected about a quarter of a century later, when Yisüngge had gained more substantial political power. If so, the earliest surviving Mongolian monument would be an edict of Töregene Khatun of 1240 and the oldest surviving text arguably The Secret History of the Mongols, a document that must originally have been written in Mongolian script in 1252, but which only survives in an edited version as a textbook for learning Mongolian from the Ming dynasty, thus reflecting the pronunciation of Middle Mongol from the second half of the 14th century.