Darkhad Dialect - Verbal System

Verbal System

Person inflections as in Oirat or Buryat are getting lost, but used to be present. There are both voluntatives (irrespective of number) in –ja/-ji as in Khalkha and –su for first person singular as in Oirat and Buryat, e.g. /ɡaldat͡ʃixa̯ja̯/ ‘let’s burn it’ and ɔrsu 'I shall enter', but the latter form is rare. The benedictive –kti is actively used as holds for Buryat, e.g. /taː bide̯ nertæ jawd͡ʒi̯ bɛekti/ ‘Please, come with us’. Next to the normal concessive in –g/-k ‘s/he may’, there is also a concessive -/ɡalda̯/ that marks an order to a third person. The other, fairly unremarkable modal verbal suffixes are the imperative, prescriptive, optative and dubitative. The inventory of indicative finite verbal suffixes contains the usual reflexes of Written Mongolian ⟨-nam⟩, ⟨-luγ-a⟩, ⟨-ǰuqui⟩ and ⟨-ba⟩, the last one being rare as usual. There is a fifth suffix, /-t͡ʃɔ/ (possilby from ⟨-ǰu orkiǰuqui⟩), probably expressing some kind of perfect aspect meaning, that is peculiar to Darkhad, e.g. /jawult͡ʃɔ/ ‘has sent’. The participles are the same as in Common Mongolic. However, a thorough analysis of the function of these items in contrast to each other has not been conducted. The converbs are not very particular, but the earliest texts of Darkhad still have a conditional /-wa̯s/ (as in Buryat and Middle Mongolian) next to /-wa̯l/. Furthermore, it used to be possible to negative them with reflexes of ⟨ügei⟩ as in Buryat. Instead of ⟨-maγča⟩ ‘as soon as’, ⟨-nsar⟩ is used.