LiCTLe of the Month for March: Mongolian

It occurred to me, as I was preparing this month's edition of Schendo's LiCTLe of the Month Club, that I was writing one more knob-slobbering tribute to Genghis Khan and the Mongolian Empire.  Which is not to say that these aren't great things to write about.  On the contrary, the achievements of Genghis and his (grand-)children make Alexander the Great look like a spoiled rich kid.

But, wait a minute....  The steppes of Mongolia have been inhabited for at least 800,000 years.  Nomadic tribes there have been a political force worth reckoning with since the Iron Age.  Squeezed between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, Communist Mongolia felt the friction between Stalin and Mao.  Despite their staunch support of Moscow during the Russian-Chinese split, Mongolia's first democratic election took place a full two months before the reunification of Germany.

While the Great Khans were certainly high points for Mongolia on the world stage, a lot more happened under the azure skies of the steppes when few others were looking.  So, dispensing with tradition, this is will be the last reference to Genghis Khan in this Mongolia post.

Instead, we'll take a moment to talk about a Mongolian athlete, writer and a ruler known more for his reforms than his conquests.  Afterwords, we'll take a look at the Mongolian language itself and the linguistic principal known as "vowel harmony."

Let's start with Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj, who founded the Mongolian Writer's Union.  A prominent leftist thinker during the early 20th century, his poems celebrated the beauty of his native land (including a few places not, technically, inside the borders of the Mongolian People's Republic, but I suppose poetic license is the prerogative of nationalists).  He also wrote the lyrics to a popular Mongolian Opera, "The Three Sad Hills."

In 2005 Asashoryu Akinori achieved what might be seen as sumo wrestling's version of a grand slam, winning all six major tournaments in the same year.  Born Dolgorsürengiin Dagvadorj in Ulan Baator, he was the first Mongolian to rise to sumo wrestling's highest rank.

Buyantu Khan became Emperor of China through his great-grandfather Kublai Khan.  Educated by the Chinese scholar Li Meng, the Emperor surrounded himself with philosophers and writers.  A great admirer of traditional Confucian thought, Buyantu Khan reintroduced many elements of Chinese political philosophy during his reign, angering some of his fellow Mongol nobles.


Of course, every Mongolian speaker, whether or not they're a Great Khan, knows how to harmonize their vowels. Mongolian is hardly the only language to use vowel harmony.  The technique is common among the languages of inner Asia, and can be found scattered among African and some Amerindian languages.  Hungarian and Finnish also have their own systems of vowel harmony, not to mention our inaugural LiCTLe of the Month, Turkish.


How does vowel harmony work?  The first thing we have to do is put our vowels into two or more groups.  The way these groups are defined is different from language to language and may be acoustic (“back” vs. “front” or “high” vs. “low”) and/or articulatory (position of the tongue; whether or not you pucker your lips when pronouncing the vowel).  It really doesn't matter how you group the vowels, the point is that they are divided.

Once these groups are established, the trick is fairly simple: all the vowels in a word have to come from one group and one group only.  There are always exceptions, of course, but this is the basic idea.

Mongolian divides its vowels into two groups: FRONT and BACK.  Nowadays, linguists who know far more about this than I prefer to use another term: Advanced Tongue Root (ATR).  They claim that for the first group, the base of the tongue is pushed forward a little bit during pronunciation:

BACK or [ATR]
A, O, U

FRONT or [Not ATR]
E, Ö, Ü

Once again, the actual mechanics of how the vowels are pronounced are not as important as the fact that all the vowels in a Mongolian word have to come from one group or the other:

Example 1: khulgana, house (all back)
Example 2: bürged, eagle (all front)

On one final note, the Mongolian vowel “I” actually swings both ways and, like my friend Scorpio at her last Halloween party, will happily make out with either group:

Example 3: tuulai, hare (all back + /i/)
Example 4: şiree, table  (all front + /i/)

Personally, I've got a soft spot in my heart for vowel harmony languages.  There's something wonderfully superfluous about it.  You certain don't need to be so picky about the sounds in your words (English certainly isn't) but I like the idea that a language ought to sound good and be easy to pronounce.  Which either means that humans are naturally poetic or just lazy...

LiCTLe for February 2010: Sanskrit
LiCTLe for May 2010: Hixkaryana

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The preceding was yet another posting by Schendo, who has never actually been to Mongolia, but has eaten a lot of mutton over the years.  Research was gathered with reference to Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Brittanica, BBC News and the Mongol-English dictionary at http://asuult.asuultserver.com/dic/.