Talk:Mongolian language/Archive 1

message: Hi Whimemsz!
I've just seen the changes of the Mongolian language side, and they are not all for the better. On the one hand it now (as intended) focuses exclusively on Halh (thy Khalkha) and the only word that was intended to be a transcription of the Mongolian script is transcribed in a wrong way (in <Monggol> the second <g> would have to be a Greek gamma). This is not really justified as the number of speakers in Inner Mongolia is either equal or even surpasses the number of Halh speakers. (You would of course propose that Inner Mongolia is divided into Ordos, Chahar etc., but that still leaves the fact that the majority of those 5.7 million speakers do not speak Halh.) But most curiously, reading the IPA of the Cyrillic letters, I am rather reminded of the Inner Mongolian pronunciation. For as to phonemes, the Halh dialect has no voiced labial or dental plosives, and the same is true of the affricates. The contrast is instead achieved by aspiration, such that the allegedly voiced phonemes go unaspired: д is /t/, т is /th/ etc. (The h of th should be put up.) For more details see “Svantesson et alii (2005): The phonology of Mongolian. New York: Oxford University Press” that deals extensively with Halh, but with diachronics of Mongolic as well.
The worst thing about the side is that we still don’t learn anything about phonology (except a hint at phonemes: you list just one single /g/; you wouldn’t be understood, e.g. bag “team”, baG “small”), morphology, syntax, vocabulary etc. Most basically, it would have to be said that Mongolic has vocal harmony, that it is agglutinating (suffixes only) and that word order is SOV. There are lots of interesting aspects as well, e.g. case system, postpositions, verbal system (verbal nouns, converbs, finite verbs; mode, evidentialis) and of course word classes (I wouldn’t trust Poppe in that respect), but I know quite well that no book available (at least as the English reader is concerned) is reliable enough. If this didn’t discourage you, you might try to use “Juha Yanhunen (ed.) (2003): The Mongolic language. London: Routledge” as a basis. If I am to find the time, I might deal with these subjects myself, but for the time being, that three most basic aspects of grammar and a change of a bunch of IPA entries should suffice. If you provide me with your email, I could mail you the transcription list of Svantesson et alii.
:Thank you for your observations. I have to say right from the start that I know hardly anything about Mongolian -- the little I do know comes mainly from a Lonely Planet guide, which I'm sure isn't the most reliable of sources. But I saw that there was hardly any information at all on this page, so I decided (perhaps mistakenly), that it would be better to add SOMEthing. I'll try to see if I can pick up some of those books soon, and try to fix the article as soon as I can. I don't really know what to do in the meantime, so if you or anyone else who knows Mongolian wanted to help fix my screwups, that would be fantastic... Thanks again for the references and the advice! --Whimemsz 02:12, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC) ((By the way, you can just use my Wikipedia userpage to get my email address))
::I think this page and the discussion could be useful :  French Wikipedia, though there are many mistake in the pages.--Henri de Solages 02:12, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And in any case, why are the phrases at the very bottom of the article? Shouldn't they be just before the references and external links sections? Being at the very bottom sort of detracts from the overall layout, at least for me, since I feel like sections like "references" and "external links" and so forth should be at the very bottom... --Whimemsz 01:16, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: changes

message: I have posted a request for opinions about a standard transcription table for mongolian on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Cyrillic)#Transcription_for_Mongolian. Please join the discussion there. --Latebird 20:57, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Transcription for Mongolian

message: Recent changes
While adding the grammar part (except phonology), I’ve taken away the list of “useful phrases” the use of which didn’t become clear at all. I didn’t insert any hyperlinks, thus a helping hand to put this right would be welcome. Furthermore, my English is rather mediocre, and while this text has been checked by one doctor of Mongolian studies and linguistics, no native speaker of English has read it through so far.
I disagree with Sergey Radchenko that a comparision to Buryat/Kalmuck would’ve been helpful, as both are not to be regarded as parts of Central Mongolian, but as independent languages within the Mongolic language family. However, South Central Mongolian lexical items (as well as phonology and other grammar, for that matter) would have their merits, preferably with a little information about the development of the Proto-Mongolic sound system.
And either Buryat is a related language or a dialect! Thus we shouldn’t extend “Mongolian”’s geographical distribution to Buryatia, or at the least we shouldn’t talk about significant numbers. G Purevdorj 14:18, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent changes

message: This article about a language I'm interested in has been vastly improved lately with the addition of a wealth of grammtical, phonological, and syntactic information, and the deletion of the "useful phrases."  I have a suggestion that someone might want to think about, though.  This is the English langauge version of wikipedia.  Most English speakers are illiterate (or in my case, nearly-illiterate) in the Cyrllic alphabet.  I can agonize my way through most of it and yeah, it's probably good for me, and yes, I know this is the way Mongolian is written, but the bottom line is, I don't know the words I'm looking at.  I have to take som much time to figure out what I'm looking at that it gets in the way of my grasping the grammatical examples.  I would understand them so much more quickly if they were Romanized.  No reason you couldn't display sample sentences in both alphabets.  I realize wikipedia isn't all about me, but I'm sure i'm not the only one in this boat.  If you follow my suggestion, thanks.  If not, thanks at least for considering it.  C.M.71.215.128.134 18:04, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Cyrllic vs. Roman

message: the phonology says that Mongolian doesn't have /k/, but it does have /g/... is that true?! I was under the impression that was impossible. --Krsont 19:27, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: no /k/?

message: Why are the palatalized consonants considered separate phonemes? Is there any difference between a palatalized consonant and a consonant + y?  i.e. is "ty" a palatalized t?  If so, isn't this just a cluster?65.102.39.98 19:07, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Palatal consonant is an article here that may answer your question.  Briefly though, "palatization" is used in linguistics to describe the "place of articulation" (the palate, as opposed to dental, aveolar, retroflex, etc).  A palatal /t/ is articulated with the blade of the tongue against the palate, while a dental /t/ is articulated with the tongue against the back of the upper teeth.  This is a single sound (phoneme).  In linguistics, "ty" would indicate two seperate phonemes pronounced in sucsession (written in IPA as /tj/)--WilliamThweatt 21:20, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The "phonetic description" part of Palatalization will help you more. BTW, WilliamThweatt, you mean [], not //, because you're talking about sounds, not phonemes. David Marjanović 17:00, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Palatalization

message: I've read a little bit about linguistics, but I know too little of that (and nothing of Mongolian) to contribute anything of substance to this article.  However, I believe that the morphology section needs to be revised: it seems to contain a talk-page-style argument.  Seeing a "(still?)" and similar notes doesn't make it appear very accurate to me Nyttend 20:44, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Morphology

message: There should be at least a section about the development of the language, Old Mongolian etc. 91.148.159.4 15:08, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: History?

message: There was a recent edit that added "Intermediate Mongolian" by Hangin to the list of references. Now, I didn't use that book for compiling the grammar part nor am I aware of any other information used here hailing from it. So it can't be a reference.
On the other hand, it would indeed be a good idea to provide some general bibliography within a lexicon article, including dictionaries (Ganhuyag, Bawden, Lessing, Chinbat), learner's books (Hangin, Luvsandorj), grammars (eg Street) and some selected scientific works and articles on diverse areas of grammar.
It would be quite possible for me to provide some notes on every book, as this might be essential for evaluating its use. However, this could presumably not be done within the article on Mongolian language as it would fill a disproportionate amount of space. An uncommented list, however, might fit in.
Any suggestions by anyone?
G Purevdorj 17:17, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: While I welcome the idea as such, I'd recommend to keep the list short and focused. Only list literature that helps explain the language, and no simple teaching material ("WP is not a How-to guide"). --Latebird (talk) 17:08, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I wish the difference between teaching (explaining "irregularities away or rather ignoring them) and analyzing (explaining) the language would be greater within Mongolian studies than it in fact is, but I fancy you'd suggest to exclude something like Vietze's Lehrbuch. Now a bunch of these Lehrbücher gets quoted in English language scientific studies, and moreover, some (")explanations(") from them are in direct competition with (")explanations(") taken for granted in the monolingual research literature. Explanations on a sufficiently scientific basis to be called satisfactory are very rare, thus it's not clear who's right. But it would be possible allright to drop a heading for Lehrbücher and at the same time retain the most important one(s) of these in the grammar part. Your "focussed" is difficult to pin down: you'll need about exactly two texts to understand negation in Mongolian, there's one big standard works on modality, there are different schools of grammarians  that youn will have to know in order only to comprehend why some people (in the West as well as in Mongolia) hold quite funny things to be true. These should be present as well with a short comment. G Purevdorj 23:09, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I deliberately used the term "focussed" because it does not force you to make black-or-white decisions. If such differences of opinion are notable enough to be mentioned in the article, then the books will end up under references either way. If a book serves multiple purposes (teaching and explanation), then just use common sense to decide if it is notable enough to be listed, and add a little blurb to say why it is interesting. --Latebird (talk) 18:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: I feel that this article should be in for some upgrading. It seems quite informative, concise, well-sourced and covering most relevant areas (I could think of a hundred more areas, but as this is just a lexicon many relevant subpoints just can't be entered. Think of all the dialects and would-be-dialect languages). If not, this might be a place for those doing the rating to utter their objections to the current status of this article. G Purevdorj (talk) 16:17, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Rating

message: "While the split of ʧ into ʧ and ʦ in Outer Mongolia and its lack in Inner Mongolia is often cited as a criterion of importance, the split between -sŋ in the Central dialect vs. -ʤɛ: in the Eastern dialect..." 
Please support discussions like this with examples. A good model is the article Russian Language where every such case is supported by samples words. Gantuya eng (talk) 10:49, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: First, I will supply the additional quotations as soon as I'm home again (might take up to a week, but I'm lacking most literature at the moment). Then, the first point made in the quoted sentence can (and will) easily be supported with an example (say, zayaa and jargal vs. jayaa and jargal), but how to illustrate the second point? It is of course possible to demonstrate that a subset of sentences ending in -jee will be rejected by Khalkha but not by Khorchin speakers, and that a set of Khalkha sentences with -sn is unacceptable to Khorchin informants. But that would be original research. Inner Mongolian dialect studies don't employ negative evidence. The study by Ashimura and to a very limited degree a study by Matsuoka contain well-founded claims on restrictions on the use of -sn, Ashimura contains information on the use of -lee and -jee. Both studies could (in a very careful description that differentiates within modern Khorchin territory) be related by general (and therefore not necessarily reliable) information provided by Bayancogtu. The stochastical claims made for various Inner Mongolian dialects can be referenced (to some extent; I'm not in Inner Mongolia at the time being). But as far as I'm aware, that's all I might be able to improve on the second point. Would you consider that sufficient? G Purevdorj (talk) 11:40, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: By sentences ending with -jee: do you mean the Inner Mongolian phenomenon that they say "Bi irjee, Bi yavjee" instead of "Bi irsen. Bi yavsan" ? Gantuya eng (talk) 12:34, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes (but by the way, if your example is not an over-generalization, even the analysis of Ashimura can't explain a frequent usage of -jee with the first person singular). But yes ... if that has not already become clear to you from the text, maybe there is a way to put it more clearly. G Purevdorj (talk) 12:58, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Bayarlalaa. Gantuya eng (talk) 14:54, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Examples needed

message: Probably it's like this: if the footnote belongs to the whole sentence, it's put after the full stop. If the footnote belongs only to the last word of the sentence, then it's put after that word but in front of the full stop. Is it right? Gantuya eng (talk) 05:43, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I'm used to putting it before the full stop when it belongs only to this sentence, but not to the preceding sentences, while I would put it behind the full stop if it belongs to the paragraph. (But determining the exact scope of references becomes a problem with almost any scientific literature.) G Purevdorj (talk) 08:17, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's right. We don't mark the beginning of the scope. :) Gantuya eng (talk) 08:40, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Footnote after full stop

message: This article contradicts Mongolian Latin script and others, by saying that cyrillic was introduced in 1937, whereas others say that latin was introduced in 1941, after which cyrillic was introduced. This is a pretty serious mistake. So which one is it? --Chinneebmy talk 15:50, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Svantesson et al. have 1930-1932 for Latin and 1941 for Cyrillic. They don't comment on what happened in the meantime. The formulation in this article doesn't contradict this: there would have been a phase of experimentation with the script from 1937 onwards followed by its becoming the only standard in 1941. (1941 is mentioned anywhere.) Ridiculously, I was unable to find any more detailled information now. But if you happen to be in the more or less fortunate situation to be in Mongolia, you can access all the literature you could possibly need to find the answer to this problem. Anyway, without more definite sources, I would suggest not to make changes in THIS article. G Purevdorj (talk) 20:10, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Which sources say "latin was introduced in 1941"?  :) Gantuya eng (talk) 03:13, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1941 or 1931

message: I guess what is not clear is whether this applies to Mongolian or Chinese speakers or both: "There is officially a standard pronunciation “based” on the Chakhar dialect of the Plain Blue Banner. A standard grammar and vocabulary is from a so-called “Inner Mongolian dialect” which is contrasted to the Oirat and Barghu-Buryat dialect." Regards, —Mattisse (Talk) 01:33, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: As it is in a text on Mongolian and as Oirat and Buryat are Mongolic as well, I presumed that the passage is clear. But what do the others think? G Purevdorj (talk) 22:32, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Dialects

message: * Köke doesn't allege that his data cannot be accounted for by Walker's analysis as he doesn't quote her, but it's trivial to conclude this as both analyses consist of rather precise descriptions of generalized stress patterns. The other point with POV was Köke's "conflicting" data as he disperses with possible ideolectical characteristics. Anyway, given that Köke is better able to deal with this data in chapter 6 than in chapter 4, it needn't really be mentioned after all. As for the quality of the data: Köke is the only one to use data from three informants and on F0, intensity, vowel length and (partly) vowel quality, thus providing transparent and non-arbitrary data. Walker on the other hand just relies on one informant who might produce unrepresentative data for various reasons. Thus, Köke's evidence is really better and would have precedence of that of Walker if it was not for possible dialectal differences.
* Note on my last edit: I did the first edit after finishing chapter 4, assuming that sentence intonation in chapter 5 won't affect the preliminary conclusions. It did, as the words discussed previously were a part of a carrier sentence with continuously falling F0, thus a syntactic-phonetic level F0 for two adjacent syllables might indicate a morpho-phonetic LOW-HIGH. I changed that accordingly, including the fact that Köke (in the final chapter) is (unexpectedly) careful in drawing any conclusions. G Purevdorj (talk) 00:08, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I did disagree with "POV", but you're right, a claim as strong as that did amount to OR, especially as there is no need to use such a blatant formulation. By the way, thanks a lot for your copyediting so far, the article did really improve! G Purevdorj (talk) 20:30, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

text: All of Mongolian. I am not sufficiently sure what is happening in Japan, though. It would be possible (though improbable) that a more extensive study has been published there since 2004. Mongolian studies love to be disconnected. G Purevdorj (talk) 08:38, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

text: 1. Yes, my mistake. "Harnud" is the family name; when I looked up "Harnud" in Google Scholar, I found many papers coauthored by Huhe Harnud. I do not understand why your insistence on referring to him/her as Köke, especially by that solely in any spot (you use solely that name in the note, you use it together with the alternative version in the bibliography). So that people can find an author in the literature, the author needs to be cited by the name they go by in the literature. I am editing the article accordingly; but of course I am open minded if someone wants to explain that I am error. Pardon my ignorance of the language, but are you sure "Köke" corresponds to "Harnud" and not to "Huhe"? Now that I searched Google Scholar for <köke harnud> (i.e., not as a phrase), there was only one result — due to an editing error in the result. The author inadvertently referred to Huhe Harnud as "Köke" just once in her dissertation (and there's no corresponding entry in her bibliography). Check this out, it's a brand new dissertation on word stress in Oirat by a native speaker, in public access PDF. It contains many remarks about Mongolic. 2. As for the review, I inserted it because it is much more widely accessible than the actual work. This is an innovation of mine inspired by this very use of the Harnud study. I don't really know how to best cite it. I still think what I did is the best solution, but I'm open to discussion.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dale Chock (talk • contribs) 17:43, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: 1. His name is Köke ~ Huhe ~ , of course. If you're South Mongolian and write in a western language, you just have to make up some surname. You can take your father's name, your tribal name etc. Thus, "Harnud" is a kind of artefact. In Chinese language publications he uses "Huhe", in Mongolian publications "Köke". As this author published much more in these languages than in English, it gets all mixed up as no one can identify Harnud with Köke. Therefore, this article does. For another quotation of Köke on Wikipedia, see Chakhar dialect. 2. Yep, it's real difficult to get a hand at this publication, thus your idea also to quote a review is possibly justified. There are some other publications quoted in this article that are even less easy to access, though. G Purevdorj (talk) 18:47, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

text: As for whether to direct readers to published reviews, maybe it should be left to the reader's professional savvy: "when doing literature searches, don't just look for monographs, look for reviews of those monographs". Dale Chock (talk) 00:38, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: In the dissertation on Oirat, several letters are not displayed (eg on page 21). Did you have this same problem when reading or is it the fault of my Acrobat reader? G Purevdorj (talk) 15:40, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Stress

message: The citations were misformatted, at least by Western practice. You don't set off publication year with a colon; you don't run the serial title together with the volume number. ¡Even if you italicize volume numbers, you still separate them from the serial title with a comma! Some publications still enclose publication year in parentheses, but I think that's a total waste of time, although I wouldn't fight persistently to keep those parentheses out. (Enclosing the year in parentheses in citations in the text is another matter. I noticed that just last month Purevdorj asked on a different talk page whether that is passé. My first reaction was to agree. But I checked very recent issues of several linguistics journals and was surprised to find that the choice of practice varies from journal to journal.) When you cite a chapter from an anthology, this is how to format it: Smith, John. 2003. Politics in Kansas. In Martin, John, and John Brown (eds.), Rightwing devastation of America. Sometown: Publisher X. Series: University of XX studies in American politics; 17. pp. 236-283. Details vary, of course. The sequence of Author, year, article title is key. Dale Chock (talk) 00:53, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The "In" before journal titles is rare, I know. The rest appears to be quite in variation, and I would somewhat prefer "(1999):" to ". 1999.". Doesn't make much of a difference, though. The conventions I usually follow do away with the series. ", pp. 177-179" instead of ": 177-179" is a waste of ink. By the way, how conventional is "177-9"? G Purevdorj (talk) 08:08, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Again, I can tolerate parenthesizing the year (and Wikipedia's template does so). As for following the year with a colon, I have never seen that elsewhere. Series are perhaps not included by everyone, but at the least, it's a common practice in linguistics. As for pagination in the style, "177-9", my sense is that it has plunged in popularity in the last 30 years, maybe even 40. Up until at least 1970, it was common, although maybe not in linguistics. Dale Chock (talk) 18:16, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup of the bibliography citations 

message: I didn't notice this character in the orthography table. What is its IPA? Should it be applied in the Mongolian transliterations? (I already respelled helnij with it.) I simply cut and pasted it from a Web page, specifically the WorldCat site. Dale Chock (talk) 04:56, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: "ė" [e] is used to transcribe Cyrillic "э" in Russian, while Cyrillic "e" is transcribed as "e" [e] (but signalling that the preceding consonant is palatalized). This is not practical for Mongolian as "e" is rare and "э" omnipresent. Therefore, a quite conventional practice for Mongolian Cyrillic is to transcribe "э" as "e" [e] and "e" in another way, eg as "je"  (in words of Mongolian origin). This is what this article does. "helnij" is preferable. G Purevdorj (talk) 08:20, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I've reverted 'ė' to 'e'. Dale Chock (talk) 18:16, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  What about the letter, ė? 

message: In a edit summary, the question has just been put: why insert the acronym MAS alongside ŠUA? I had found out the ŠUA stood for Academy of Sciences and that its full name was, of course Mongolian Academy of Sciences. I wanted to put a link to their Web site, www.mas.ac.mn/en/. Now that the objection to "MAS" has been raised, let's have some discussion about it. Dale Chock (talk) 01:56, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't aware that they are using MAS themselves. As they do, I have no objections and just undid my last edit. G Purevdorj (talk) 07:26, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mongolian Academy of Sciences (MAS) 

message: 1. 'Comprise' or 'constitute'? Comprise is a permanent nuisance in English usage. The usage of these two words ought to be: the parts constitute the whole, the whole comprises the parts ('comprise' comes from 'comprehend'). (Also, the whole consists of the parts.) Although many people do use 'comprise' as a synonym for 'constitute' (see discussion here), in normative use this is to be avoided. In an academic essay such as this article, ambiguity of vocabulary is a bad thing. And since 'consist of' and 'constitute' are never "flipped" in meaning, they are the reasonable choice of point of departure; 'comprise' should be assigned a meaning that does not conflict with their meanings. Another alternative would be to eschew 'comprise' in order to avoid confusion. 
2. The use of "as well" in the following edit is inappropriate. Some might argue that this might be more a logic issue than an issue of idiomatic English usage, but I think it is a vocabulary issue, at least in part. Mongolian has been written in a variety of alphabets. . . . Between 1930 and 1932, a short-lived attempt was made to introduce the Latin script in the Mongolian state, and after a preparatory phase, the Cyrillic script was declared as mandatory by government decree. From 1991 to 1994, an attempt at reintroducing the traditional alphabet failed in the face of popular resistance.[86] In informal contexts of electronic text production, the use of Latin is common as well. In my opinion, the "as well" would only be apt if the immediately preceding sentence made explicit reference to either the use of some other alphabet or to some purpose other than electronic text production. Apparently, the intended interpretation is "in informal contexts of electronic text production, the Cyrillic alphabet is of course usual, and the Latin alphabet is common as well". But as I just said, the first part of this thought is not expressed in close enough proximity to the clause about the Latin alphabet. In any case, it would be ridiculously superfluous to mention that the Cyrillic alphabet is used in informal contexts of electronic text production for Mongolian — either often or most often — given that that's the alphabet Mongolian is written in otherwise. (Unless it were in fact the case that Mongolians tend to avoid their own established alphabet when producing electronic texts. But that would be big news deserving of more conspicuous announcement.) Since we are thus enjoined from stating that Cyrillic is often used for that purpose, it would not be apt to state that a different alphabet is "also common" or "common as well". If, despite this argument, one has a yearning to employ the phrase "as well", here might be one way to legitimize it (I think this wording would be strained, still not quite apt). . . . . [in the 1930s] the Cyrillic script was declared as mandatory by government decree. But with the advent of electronic text production, the use of the Latin alphabet has, in informal contexts of this activity, become common as well. From 1991 to 1994, an attempt at reintroducing the traditional alphabet failed in the face of popular resistance.[86]. Note that I think the old sequencing of the three sentences created a disruption of the train of thought. Dale Chock (talk) 01:45, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language usage edits 21-22 September 2009 

message: In the source depicting presence of the Үү replacements with Її this phenomenon occurs when Internet Explorer/FireFox determines encoding table for the site presentstion as Cyrillic (Windows-1251) but if we change this encoding table to the West European (ISO-8859-1) all Її will be visible as Үү (as these symbols were written in the original text). So dealing with the Mongolian Cyrillic web-sites you need sometimes exchange encoding tables, or simply mention that Її = Үү. But in the original source was not written  Її, this symbols are erroneously presented at your computer as encoding table was misdefined. Bogomolov.PL (talk) 07:47, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Үү written as Її 

message: This is in response to an edit 11 Nov 2009 by G Purevdorj. After all, two of the article's four tokens of "Uigur" occur in a single sentence, yet in that sentence you only added the 'h' to the first token. Back 2-3 months ago when I saw that the spelling without 'h' is used by none other than the article's leading source, Svantesson et al., that induced me to refrain from adding the 'h'. Since in English language scholarship the 'h' spelling is conventional, it was scholastically appropriate for me to insert the footnote. Dale Chock (talk) 22:50, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Uigur' or 'Uighur'? 

message: Obviously, we got a new video in the phonology section. The sound quality is not that perfect, and it should be completely unintelligible to beginners anyway, but that's probably okay. The video seems to be private, but all of the speechactions are commonplace, so that it is not that likely that somebody will consider her or his privatesphere violated by this. (Unless, of course, one would altogether object to being displayed at a prominent place on the internet.) If the video is indeed to be considered unproblematic, I have a suggestion to make. If somebody (maybe Ganaa) would provide a transcription into Cyrillic or Latin Mongolian, I would be willing to provide a phonemic transcription, morpheme analysis and translation. If we would have some opportunity to embed this in wikipedia as well, we would have a wonderful. By the way, do you prefer "translates it as GOOD as he can" or "as WELL as he can"? G Purevdorj (talk) 10:20, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: In formal English, "good" is an adjective and "well" is an adverb. Don't get confused by colloquial use of "good" for both. --Latebird (talk) 19:57, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

text: Always vodka. Vodka everywhere. Sea of vodka. Disgusting. Gantuya eng (talk) 11:55, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, pretty typical, but I guess that is an answer to my suggestion. G Purevdorj (talk) 12:26, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

text: OK, I'll tell you what I know about it.  I took it in a public place, when I was in Mongolia, so it certainly should fall within fair use.  The image quality is not the best, but that might be good; it makes it pretty hard to recognize the individuals, which is a good thing for fair use.  My Mongolian is only good for a few phrases, so I certainly can not translate it.  Even without a translation, I think it is interesting to have this, just so a novice can hear what the language sounds like.  I do have some more videos.  I have one (which is very dark) of a clip of the whole group singing a folk song (that is unrecognized to me) that I may add to the Music of Mongolia page soon.  Maybe someone can identify the song, but it might be nice even without this since there is no music on the page now.  Thanks for your comments, let me know if you have more questions or comments.--Qfl247 (talk) 17:53, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: New video

message: should http://www.mongoliacourses.org/ added as another external link? Seems the course materials for two of the three courses are free with registration. Yaan (talk) 15:55, 5 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: What is more: you can access the course material without registration! We definitely need to add that link! Good contrib! G Purevdorj (talk) 23:43, 5 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Any idea what happened to http:\\tbg.torama.ru Sonsov uu? Is the site down or is the server just too slow? Yaan (talk) 10:54, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  links 

message: "Short non-initial vowels have been reduced to 71% the length of short word-initial vowels and become centralized, in the course of which losing their status as phonemes and becoming non-phonemic."
This sounds very strange and should be clarified. How can a vowel phoneme be said to have "become non-phonemic"? If the non-initial short vowels are "not phonemic", what are they? Allophones of something? Of what then? Or is the intended meaning that they are neutralized (i.e. that all are realized the same way, so that several distinct phonemes share the same allophone)? If so, that should be stated explicitly.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 13:48, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: A claim about the vowels that needs clarification

message: "Some suffixes can occur with /a, ɔ, e, o/, following the last phonemic vowel in the word stem, in which case underlying /ʊ, u/ are realized as [a, e] respectively."
The example given in the text does not show /ʊ, u/ being realized as [a, e]. Nor is it clear where those underlying /ʊ, u/ are supposed to be located. In the suffixes? No, they never change to anything but /ʊ, u/ according to the table in Svantesson et al. (p.48). In the stems? But I don't see them changing at all. Svantesson et al. are cited, yet the description there is very different and, in particular, doesn't mention "underlying /ʊ, u/ being realized as [a, e]". --91.148.159.4 (talk) 14:25, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The idea of that formulation presumably was that harʊl-ar should have an assimilation of ‚a‘ in ‚-ar‘ to the preceding ‚ʊ‘, but that’s a far cry from “underlying”. There is nothing like an underlying archi-phoneme /U/ in the suffixes in question, and flexional suffixes don’t affect the stem in any such meaningful way in Mongolian. Just deleted that strange statement. G Purevdorj (talk) 04:07, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  ATR harmony description mystifying