Language Analysis

July 8th

I may be using terms that you aren't familiar with, but no worries. You can ignore them or else you can just imagine that they mean beautiful wonderful things. I am going to talk about some of the unique things about the Mongolian language. They use a different alphabet and have 35 letters total. Initially, its confusing to read because some characters are similar but are a completely different sound. (H in Mongolian is a “N” sound, P in Mongolian is a “R” sound.) I still mix them up sometimes, but its not that hard to adjust to.

Mongolian has some foreign sounds that are not used in English. The letter X is like a hard “H” sound (it might be more helpful think about what it sounds like when Darth Vader is breathing.) The “L” sound is very difficult to explain. It more resembles our “th” sound. (Pretend like you are going to pronounce an “L,” but instead let the air flow through the sides of your mouth.) Anyways, Mongolia loves fricatives (sh, th, s, v) and some of the stops are a little less common (p and k show up mostly from borrowed Russian words.)

Depending on where a letter is placed on the word the sound occasionally changes. The g (which is usually a stop) turns into a fricative when it is in the middle of the word. At the end of words, the normally voiced stops sound voiceless. (Its hard tell whether the final letter is a j/ch, g/k, d/t. The X sporadically is pronounced as a voiceless guttural trill (instead of the Darth Vader breath). It might be just certain words, because I have not found the pattern. The vowels are a little difficult to pronounce, but the sounds are very consistent with the spelling. “A” has one sound in Mongolian. In English, “A” has a number of sounds. I apologize ahead of time to the Mongolians who have to figure out how to pronounce English vowels correctly.

Another major difference between Mongolian and English is case endings. For those of you who have studied languages like Greek or Latin, you might be familiar with some of the terms: Nominative, Dative, Genitive, Accusative, Ablative and Comitative. In English, we use prepositions as a substitute for many of them. (with a dog, from the store, by car) In Mongolian, a suffix is added to the end of the word.  (dogtei, storeaac, caraar) Also there are endings to indicate possession, verb tense, and direct objects.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that Mongolia uses a lot of lengthened vowels. In some cases there are two words that sound exactly the same except for the vowel lengthening. Paper is “tsaas,” and snow is “tsas.” “Han” means “a wall,” and “haan” means “where?” There are many words that sound similar. One day I was trying to say the word “twenty,” but I accidentally said the word for poison. Its amusing to see people's reaction when I mispronounce something and it actually means an entirely different word. To be continued...