Mongolian's Weird Phonology Explained

Just a few fun points bout the Mongolian language's phonology explained.

[@Koreley]

That's such a nice a posteriori conlang! Now, where'd you hid the actual mongolian language?

[@micheldesjardins9174]

Hey, Talarkhal is more like "to thank", the actual word for thank you is Bayarlalaa. Your accent is very good by the way

[@fungmatkhan1998]

Yeah you are 100% right! I actually had another commenter misinterpret what I meant, so I should have made it clearer in the video. Also thank you so much for saying that!

[@Fnatic2010]

Talarhah would be the verb. Talarhal is noun meaning 'gratitude, appreciation'. Usage is talarhal uzuuleh - to show gratitude. Uzuuleh meaning to show something.

[@fungmatkhan1998]

@@Fnatic2010 Yes I should have made it clear in the video. When I translated "Talahal" as "thanks", I meant it in the sense of the noun meaning "gratitude," not the expression. Sorry about any confusion I may have caused :/.

[@jan_kisan]

For me, the most challenging part is differentiating between ө/өө and у/уу. Folks on KZbin demonstrate them one way, and it appears distinct enough, but then i ask a local to say words like 30 and 40, and i'm hearing the same vowel. like what the hell.

[@Arviragus13]

I've heard /g~ɢ/ pronounced as ɣ~ʁ in all back-vowel environments from a number of Outer Mongolian speakers. I'm only a beginner but I haven't found any words that are distinguished on /g/ vs /ɢ/, but /ɢ/ (and by extension ʁ) seem to just be allophones

[@fungmatkhan1998]

Great question, I did talk about this a bit in the video, but it may not have been very clear. /ɢ/ is only destinguished from /g/ in the coda position of words with back vowels. This is indicated in writing by having a silent vowel follow the "г" to indicate it is pronounced as /ɢ/ instead of /g/ which is the default pronunciation of /g/ in the coda position. Compare the pronunciation of the word "бага" /paɢ/ with "баг" /pag/. As you can see these, words differ only by the pronunciation of the final consonant, meaning they are phonemes, and not just allophones. One small thing to note, in the video I write бага and баг as being pronounced [paq] and [pak] respectively. This is just the phonemic realization of those two sounds. They tend to be devoiced word finally. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any more questions!

[@frank_calvert]

Loved finally having an explanation for parts of Mongolian I didn't understand, I would love for you to do more.

[@abarette_]

don't forget to submit it this year!

[@zhaochenwu9460]

Clear, and informative. Thank you!

[@fungmatkhan1998]

No prob man, glad you enjoyed!

[@ChristianJiang]

I feel blessed that my KZbin homepage recommended this gem of a vid!! So basically there’s some vowel harmony going on in Mongolian, right?

[@N00bcrunch3r]

Yes, Mongolian has vowel harmony like its neighbor Turkic languages.

[@gregorygreif5058]

Great video! What advice do you have for someone who wants to learn to speak Mongolian accurately but has little to no linguistic background? Талархал!

[@fungmatkhan1998]

Great question! Honestly, the landscape for Mongolian resources isn't the best because of how few people are interested in it (hence why I thought I'd make a video trynna bring awareness). The best thing I can recommend is getting a textbook, there are a few for beginners out there. The ones I remember starting with were called "Modern Mongolian" by John Gaunt, and "Colloquial Mongolian" by Alan J. K. Sanders. I don't remember them requiring too much linguistic knowledge but I could be wrong. You can also watch a channel called "Mongolian Language\ Nomiin Ger School" here on youtube, they provide a lot of good introductory stuff, though like I said before resources are scarce so you will probably have to end up mixing and matching a bit to get the best effect. Also, I'm curious, how did you find the vid if you have little to no linguist background? I imagine it might have been a bit confusing 😅. Oh and I should have mentioned in the vid, the more common way to say "thank you" is "баярлалаа" (bayarlalaa), literally: I was recently happy.

[@gregorygreif5058]

Thanks for the advice! I've actually been living in Mongolia for a little over a year, so I'm at a basic conversational level already. The two issues I have right now are pronunciation and discerning sounds (besides all the other challenges of learning a language). Basically people can't understand me and I can't understand them, even when I know all the words they're using if I see it written down. Hence watching your video! You're right it was confusing, but I could tell you were talking about the most difficult parts of Mongolian pronunciation (the different g's, how vowels sound, etc). My question after watching it was "how do you learn to pronounce/discern all those weird sounds?" And thanks for the resource tips. That is another challenge: there are beginner resources available, but there is nothing to help make the leap to advanced listening/speaking. I hope you keep making videos!

[@fungmatkhan1998]

@@gregorygreif5058 Oh, my apologies, I should not have assumed. To be honest, if it is pure pronunciation you are looking for, even linguistics knowledge isn't very helpful. I kinda tried to show this in the vid, but oftentimes how linguists describe a language and how it is actually pronounced are two very different things. In addition, just knowing that the Mongolian "г" and "х" are often pronounced with the uvula instead of the soft palate doesn't really really help, speaking from experience here. Honestly, I don't think there is much you can do apart from just practice listening to stuff, trying to discern what they are saying, and trying to repeat it. As you said there aren't a lot of materials for intermediate to advance listening so you'll probably have to rely on either shows aimed at kids or like I said they are a few channels on youtube that offer SOME beginner's materials. I mentioned Nomiin Ger before, the other one you can look up is Easy Languages, they have a few Mongolian vids that are a bit harder, but they all have subtitles. Finally, if it's just the "г" and "х" sounds you have trouble with you can try looking them up individually. Wikipedia has pages on them both that contain audio files of them being pronounced. The weird "г" sound is called a "Voiced Uvular Plosive" and the two "х" sounds are called a "voiceless velar fricative" (for words with front/feminine/tense vowels) and the other is a "Voiceless uvular fricative" (for words with back/masculine/lax vowel). Hope that helps!

[@EchoLog]

@@gregorygreif5058 Lingthusiasm had an excellent episode that explained to me why I was having the exact same issue with Hindi and it's voiced aspirated stop consonants. Here's the link, fascinating stuff. kzbin.info/www/bejne/b52QaGalhMyVo9E

[@shadowxthevampiressofficial]

This language sounds like it was made by Stitch's people

[@Xnoob545]

As soon as you got to the consonants part I was like: hey is this inspired by jan Misali

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

Is there any reason Mongolian sounds a little like Greenlandic? Is it just coincidence or are they distantly related?

[@aidanmokalla7601]

Did you meant to say "allophones" as 3:30?

[@Shareenear]

Mongolian is like evil Kalmyk 'cause in Kalmyk it's the other way around: a lot of consonants in a row are written but there are vowels between them that are not written lol

[@georgedeng8646]

You sound like Stitch at the end.

[@lingandetyrox]

Are you a native Mongolian? Fungmat Khan

[@abarette_]

no, 5:36