Ebook: The Mongolic Languages (Routledge Language Family Series)

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.