Benjamin Brosig

The Mongolic term khaan ('king'), for which there is full correspondence, semantic and phonological, in sixteenth century Portuguese cão, is used as a starting-point to identify the graphemes that correspond to several Mongolic consonants in place names transcribed in the chapters related to the Tartars in Fernão Mendes Pinto's Peregrinação (1614). With the deduced rules of pronunciation at hand, it is possible to establish new pairs of lexical correspondences and solve a brief lexicon extracted from the list of Tartar toponyms.

In this paper, we analyze the clitic YUM (< ‘thing’) in Khalkha Mongolian which, in different syntactic contexts, reinforces assertiveness or expresses different shades of presumption or presupposition. The former holds for declaratives where the presence of YUM conveys the speaker’s strong subjective commitment. In question clauses, YUM is used to indicate the speaker’s subjective and often strong guess, sometimes to the point that the speaker presupposes that the proposition actually obtains. In subordinate clauses, YUM may fulfill the same function or serve as a structurally necessary nominalizer for adjectival predicates without introducing any semantic opposition. In declaratives marked as immediately perceived, YUM conveys inference via assumptive reasoning. We thus analyze YUM as a marker of subjective speaker conviction that within the Khalkha Mongolian declarative system is opposed to both simple factuality and overt evidential marking.

Brosig, Benjamin. 2018. A Grammar of Wutun. Asian Highlands Perspectives 51:413-418.

Erika Sandman. 2016. A Grammar of Wutun. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Doctoral dissertation, xii, 370 p.  [http://bit.ly/2C0jMCY, accessed 13 December 2017].

An occasional problem when doing research on the languages of northern China is that while there are medium-sized structuralist, historical, and contemporary grammars for many local non-Sinitic varieties (e.g., Todaeva 1966, Chen and Cinggeltei 1986, and Fried 2010 for Bonan), the same does not seem to be equally true for their Sinitic contact varieties. A Grammar of Wutun, a dissertation written by Erika Sandman at the two departments of World Culture and Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki, helps close this gap for what has since Chen (1981) been known as one of the most idiosyncratic varieties of North-Western Mandarin. This language formed as part of the Amdo Sprachbund in intensive contact with Amdo Tibetan and, to some extent, Qinghai Bonan.
A Grammar of Wutun is based on Basic Linguistic Theory (Dixon 1997, 2010) and tends to make use of well-established classics for individual linguistic domains (e.g., Lamprecht 1994 for information structure, Yap et al. 2011 for nominalization). Based on a corpus of approximately 1,300 naturally attested and 1,100 elicited clauses mostly collected by the author herself, it first describes the sociolinguistic and research context (1-18), the phonology (19-41, following Janhunen et al. 2008) and word classes (42-175, nouns, verbs, minor) of Wutun. After attested morphological forms are thus accounted for, it continues by describing functional domains such as aspect (176-205); evidentiality and egophoricity (206-239); clausal word order, valency, and information structure (240-286); clause-type-related morphological mechanisms for interrogating, ordering, and negating (287-310); and clause connection (311-348). The book closes with glossed and translated transcriptions of three short procedural monologues (349-361).

In the nominal domain, Wutun exhibits an interesting distinction in the plural domain. The suffix -jhege can indicate either numbers of approximately 3 to 4 or generic groups (e.g., lhoma-jhege 'a few students' / 'students (in general)' when following regular nouns, but it refers to non-collective groups with personal pronouns (ngu-jhege 'each of us individually'). It contrasts with -dera ~ -duru used for delimited groups with regular nouns (ren-dera 'the people (e.g., of this country)'), and with -mu, denoting collectives when attached to pronouns (nga-mu 'we (as a group)'; 48-50, 71-72). Wutun has also developed a case system with a zero nominative and five marked cases. Particularly notable among these are the sociative in -liangge which grammaticalized from 'two' (cf. SM liăng ge 'two') (56-61) and the "optional dative" in -ha that is used to mark several types of non-actors and functions as a form of differential case marking conditioned by information structure (277-286).
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This short note serves the purpose of setting the record of the decipherment of the Mongolian Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut inscriptions straight. Until recently, the Brāhmī inscriptions on the Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut stelae in Mongolia remained undeciphered, and any knowledge concerning the language in which they were written had been lost centuries ago. Finally, in the 2000s, Dieter Maue, an epigraphist and a leading specialist on the Brāhmī script, made a new reading of the inscriptions, allowing, for the first time, the question concerning the underlying language to be approached in a meaningful way. Then, the French historian Étienne de La Vaissière invited Alexander Vovin, during the latter's visit to Paris, to have a look at Maue's reading of the Khüis Tolgoi inscription. Vovin recognized the language as Mongolic, but there were still too many unidentifiable words and grammatical forms to allow for a complete translation. In 2014, an international team consisting of Dieter Maue (Germany), Alexander Vovin (USA, then already permanently working in France), Mehmet Ölmez (Turkey), and Étienne de La Vaissière (France) was formed, and the group travelled to Mongolia, accompanied by two specialists in 3D photography with the relevant instruments for taking 3D pictures. The principal objective was to document the inscriptions as completely as possible. The team surveyed the inscriptions and took 3D pictures of the Khüis Tolgoi I and Brāhmī Bugut inscriptions, but could not do the same with Khüis Tolgoi II due to circumstances beyond the team's control. For more details on the team's travel to Mongolia, see Ölmez (2018). After the survey, Dieter Maue revised his epigraphic analysis and Alexander Vovin offered a first linguistic analysis and interpretation of the texts. The results were reported at the