Middle Mongolian Language - Corpus

Corpus

The temporal delimitation of Middle Mongol causes some problems as shown in definitions ranging from the 13th until the early 15th or until the late 16th century. This discrepancy is mainly due to the fact that there are very few documents written in Mongolian language to be found between the early 15th and late 16th century. It is not clear whether these two delimitations constitute conscious decisions about the classification of e.g. a small text from 1453 with less than 120 words or whether the vaster definition is just intended to fill up the time gap for which little proper evidence is available.

Middle Mongol survived in a number of scripts, namely notably Phagspa (decrees during the Yuan Dynasty), Arabic (dictionaries), Chinese, Mongolian script and a few western scripts. Usually, the Stele of Yisüngge is considered to be its first surviving monument. It is a sports report written in Mongolian writing that was already fairly conventionalized then and most often dated at the verge of 1224 and 1225. However, Igor de Rachewiltz argues that it is unlikely that the stele was erected at the place where it was found in the year of the event it describes, suggesting that it is more likely to have been erected about a quarter of a century later, when Yisüngge had gained more substantial political power. If so, the earliest surviving Mongolian monument would be an edict of Töregene of 1240 and the oldest surviving text arguably the Secret History of the Mongols, a document that must originally have been written in Mongolian script arguably in 1252, but which only survives in an edited version as a textbook for learning Mongolian from the Ming period, thus reflecting the pronunciation of Middle Mongol from the second half of the 14th century.

The term Middle Mongol is problematic insofar as there is no body of texts that is commonly called "Old Mongol". While a revision of this terminology for the early period of Mongolian has been attempted, the lack of a thorough and linguistically based periodization of Mongolian up to now has constitutes a problem for any such attempts. The related term Preclassical Mongolian is applied to Middle Mongol documents in Mongolian script that show some distinct linguistic peculiarities.