Fun Linguistic Tidbits

Being a linguistics major, I enjoy language-related phenomena. Seems pretty straightforward. I have included some notes for the curious. (Because the phonetic/Cyrillic symbols might get garbled, I've used English letters whenever possible.)

Modern Mongolian, as written in Outer Mongolia (where we are staying), uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Under Soviet influence, Mongolia hastily switched from the Semitic-based Classical Mongolian script to Cyrillic. (See Wikipedia's awesome article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_language for more information about writing systems and the structure of the language.) Mongolian is a Turkic-Altaic language, distantly related to Turkish.

Mongolian has seven vowels. Four of these correspond to [a] as in "car," [e] as in "egg" (but slightly higher - somewhat like "is"), [i] as in "team," and [u] as in "boot." The others are a high back unrounded vowel, a mid-low back rounded one (as in "aww"), and a high back rounded vowel something like the "u" in "put." The last two are spelled with a plain O and an O with a line through it, respectively. All vowels come in short and long versions. Mongolian has vowel harmony, which means that the vowels in each word will tend to be similar to each other. There are two categories of vowels, masculine and feminine. The "masculine" vowels are produced low and back in the mouth, and the "feminine" ones tend to be high and fronted.

Basically, there are two vowels for U where English has only one, and there are also two for O. Many people learning Mongolian, regardless of their native language, have trouble telling these four vowels apart. In our conversation classes at the National University, our teachers patiently repeat the difference between "yyl" and "YYl." We hear the difference when they say it, but it's very difficult for us to distinguish vowel sounds that don't exist in English.

Diphthongs are written with the vowel plus a short [i]. The diphthongs are usually pronounced as a single vowel that's been raised - A is pronounced [a], but A plus short [i] is pronounced like the "a" in "can" (in casual speech).

Consonants are a little easier. Mongolian has many sounds that are similar to English. It also has the [x] of German [lachen]. The Cyrillic alphabet has many specific spelling rules, some of which are completely arbitrary and exist only because the Soviets wanted the Mongolian language to include every single Cyrillic letter. An interesting difference between Russian and Mongolian pronunciations of Cyrillic is that Mongolian sometimes has affricates where Russian has fricatives. For example, the letter Ж is pronounced in Russian as the "ge" in "beige," and in Mongolian as if it has a D in front of it ("bridge"). The letter З is pronounced as [z] in Russian but [dz] in Mongolian. Fun!

The sounds [w,v] are often interchangeable in Mongolian. Words that are spelled with the V sound are often pronounced with W. This is a bit frustrating for English speakers because we have a phonemic contrast between the two sounds (meaning that the words "wet" and "vet" mean different things).

Interesting gaps include a lack of the P sound and the G/K sound that we have in English. For the latter, Mongolian has a uvular stop rather than a velar one, meaning that it's produced farther back in the mouth. This is the same sound that's often written "q" in transcriptions from Arabic. Mongolian has [f] only in foreign loanwords. Native speakers of Mongolian will often pronounce "Pittsburgh" as [fitsburg] because the sound P doesn't exist.

Sweet! More will come soon. Please comment on this post if you have any particular interest in the Mongolian language or linguistics in general, and I'll try to answer the questions. (A quick caveat: I am a student, not an expert! However, I will do my best to be knowledgeable.)