Search
| # | Search | Downloads | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The article presents the results of a linguistic analysis of non-standard case forms occurring in the «History of Altan Khan» (Mo. Erdeni tunumal neretü sudur, lit. ‘The Jewel Translucent Sūtra’), a unique Mongolian manuscript of the early 17th century presently kept at the library of the Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences (Hohhot, China). It is the largest Mongolian original (untranslated) historical and literary work dating from the late 16th — early 17th centuries. The manuscript has been widely known since the mid-1980s but its linguistic investigation still remains to be carried out. The article reveals and brings together information on the use of non-standard case forms in the language of the monument with references to the relevant literature and occurrences of each form in the text. The notion of non-standard forms refers to those case endings that are either not mentioned in normative descriptions of Classical Written Mongol, or explicitly marked in them as archaic, colloquial or dialectal. The author provides an analysis of the following non-standard case forms: the genitive in +i, the non-classical genitive suffix +i+yin, the accusative in +yi after consonant stems, the non-classical accusative suffix +i+yi, the accusative in +U, the dative-locative in +DU, the dative-locative ending +DUri, the ablative in +DAčA. The investigation of these forms allows us to conclude that the language of the «History of Altan Khan» presents a sophisticated combination of linguistic archaisms (the genitive suffix +i, the accusative in +yi after consonant stems, the dative-locative in +DUri and the ablative in +DAčA) and innovations (the shape of the dative-locative marker +DU *+DU/r, the late complex genitive and accusative endings +i+yin and +i+yi), while at the same time containing some idiosyncratic features, such as the use of the accusative in +U supposedly unattested in other Written Mongol sources. The language system of the monument most probably belongs to a transitional stage between Preclassical and Classical periods in the development of Written Mongol and seems to be strongly influenced by colloquial speech and/or local Mongolic dialects of the time. Keywords: Mongolic languages, historical grammar, historical morphology, noun cases, Written Mongol, Mongolian chronicles | 1014 | ||||