Product Description

The Mongolic Languages form a linguistically well-defined but geographically widely-dispersed family of more than a dozen separate languages distributed from East and North Asia to Central and West Asia. It belongs to the trans-Eurasian belt of agglutinative and suffixing languages, but differences in the linguistic environment of the individual Mongolic languages have resulted in significant and typologically interesting variation involving both the phonological systems and the morphosyntactic patterns.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3290333 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Review

'The book is a useful handbook for all who are interested in Mongolic languages and a long-awaited fundamental work for researchers of Mongolistics.' - Acta Orientalia

'...Remarkably useful and carefully edited... it is a volume that will surely serve its field well for years to come, and also one that, even in these days of astonishingly high prices, is well worth what it costs.' - International Journal of Uralic and Altaic Studies

The book is a useful handbook for all who are interested in Mongolic languages and a long-awaited fundamental work for researchers of Mongolistics. - Acta Orientalia

...Remarkably useful and carefully edited... it is a volume that will surely serve its field well for years to come, and also one that, even in these days of astonishingly high prices, is well worth what it costs. - International Journal of Uralic and Altaic Studies

Customer Reviews

A strong entry in the Routledge Langage Family Series sure to entertain
THE MONGOLIC LANGUAGES ed. Juha Janhunen is another entry in the Routledge Language Family Series. As is common with the other volumes in the series, it contains a chapter each for the various languages in a family which provide a mainly synchronic sketch of their grammar and lexicon. The languages examined here are Written Mongol, Middle Mongol, Khamnigan Mongol, Buryat, Dagur, Khalkha (the official language of the Republic of Mongolia), Ordos, Oirat, Kalmuck, Moghol, Shira Yughur, Mongghul, Mangghuer, Bonan, and Santa.

Besides these articles on individual languages, there are also several chapters in a comparative vein, most interesting to me because of their diachronic goodness. We find articles on Proto-Mongolic, Mongol dialects, and Intra-Mongolic taxonomy. Juha Janhunen contributed a fascinating chapter on "Para-Mongolic", the languages that must have been descended from a common ancestor with Proto-Mongolic, but cannot be grouped with the surviving Mongolic languages. One such language is Khitan, which we can guess at from its still little-understood script and loanwords in Manchu. The final chapter of the book is on "Turko-Mongolic relations", which shows how so many of the similarities between the two language families are due to long contact, and (pace Ramstedt) Proto-Mongolian was in contact with a Chuvash-type language.

The volume is beautifully typeset and bound, a feast for the eyes. My own research involves the Indo-European, Uralic/Finno-Ugrian and Turkic language families, and I'm very much an outsider in Mongolic linguistics. Therefore, I cannot give a professional evaluation of this volume. Nonetheless, as a dilettante, I found it very informative and entertaining.