ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 13: Mongolian Mongolian is the national language of Mongoli
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 13: Mongolian Mongolian is the national language of Mongolia and the largest member of the Mongolic language family, itself unrelated to any other language family. In phonetics the “l” sound is called a “lateral approximant”. Approximant refers to the manner of articulation aka. the way the airflow is instructed to make noise. Approximant shave very little obstruction and are the closest to vowels of any consonants. Lateral refers to place of articulation aka. The position of your tongue, lips, throat, etc in making the sound. Lateral sounds cause the airflow to split and flow to the left and right of the tongue instead of over the top. I’ll give you a moment to make a few “l” sounds and feel this for yourself. Mongolian does not have an “l” sound like English, instead it has a much rarer lateral consonant; a lateral fricative. Where approximates barely obstruct air, fricatives force the air to undergo a lot of friction. “S”, “v” and “th” are examples of English fricatives. So to make this Mongolian sound, put your tongue in the same position as you would an “l” and try to go “zzzz” without moving your tongue. Are you making a particularly wet hissing noise that sounds vaguely like an “l” when you add a vowel after it? Good job! You’re nailing it. Mongolian is written with both the Cyrillic alphabet (the one used by Russia and many other Slavic nations) and Mongolian Script: ᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴ. Mongolian script is more typically written from top to bottom (Tumblr seems to only let me write left to right). This script is descended from the writing system native to the Turkic Uighur people of Central Asia, and like all languages of that descent are unique in that they are written top to bottom in columns going left to right (right to left is more common, as seen in Chinese and Japanese). Mongolian, like Turkish, is an agglutinative language with pronounced vowel harmony. For this and there reasons many links to the Turkic languages have been proposed, but none have proven themselves true. -- source link