Mongols first invaded and ruled Tibet under the Great Yuan in the 13th and 14th centuries, and later as the Khoshut Khanate in the 17th and 18th centuries. During these two periods they established close ties with the different schools of Tibetan Buddhism and translated many Tibetan works into Mongolian, including the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon (Mon. Ганжуур Данжуур Ganjuur Danjuur).
Buddhism became widely practiced among the Mongols, but was brutally persecuted under Communist rule in the 20th century to the point that Mongolian Buddhism was almost completely destroyed. Since the Mongolian Revolution of 1990, efforts have been made to revive Mongolian Buddhism, spearheaded by monks who survived the purges.
Much of Mongolian culture was imported from Tibet, just as much of Tibetan culture was imported from India. Mongolian parents have sent their children to study in Tibet for hundreds of years, including such important figures as the Fourth Dalai Lama, who was born in Hohhot to a Mongol family descended from Altan Khan. Similarly, but in the opposite direction, the Bogd Khan was an ethnic Tibetan from Lhasa, who would later become a major religious and political leader for a newly independent Mongolia after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911.
Due to centuries of close contact, the two languages have traded many words with each other. For example, the Tibetan titles “Dalai” and “Pakshi” are of Mongolian origin, and Mongolian words like tsam (a religious dance) and garchag (“catalogue”) have been borrowed from Tibetan. Additionally, both languages have a largely head-final syntax, and form compound nouns in similar ways. Although many important Buddhist texts were translated into Mongolian, Tibetan is often still used as the language of instruction in Mongolian monasteries today.
Tibetologists can benefit greatly from studying Mongolian. Since so many Tibetan texts were translated into Mongolian beginning in the 13th century, the Mongolian editions can be read alongside the Tibetan ones to better understand a text’s grammar and vocabulary. The two languages complement each other in four major ways:
- Word-formation: Tibetan tends to form new words using compounding, whereas Mongolian uses derivational suffixes, which gives a different angle on a word’s meaning.
- Grammar: some particles and grammatical structures are poorly described and/or poorly understood in existing language textbooks for Tibetan and Mongolian. Comparing the Tibetan and Mongolian versions of a text can help fill in the blanks.
- Precision: Mongolian uses spaces between words, and tends to deconstruct Tibetan compounds by explicitly writing out case particles. These features make the analysis of a sentence less ambiguous.
- Sound changes: Mongolian translations and Tibetan-Mongolian dictionaries provide lots of data on the historical pronunciation of each language.
Below I have assembled some resources for learning Mongolian, focusing on Classical Mongolian as written in the Mongolian script. This is a good introductory summary of Mongolian Buddhist literature.
Textbooks:
- An introduction to classical (literary) Mongolian, by Grønbech and Krueger
- This is a good introductory book with readings at the end of each chapter.
- Mongolian language handbook, by Poppe
- This is a good reference book.
- There is also a textbook by Sarkozi, but it is not on the Internet Archive.
Transliterated texts:
- The Vajracchedika Sutra
- Version in Mongolian script available on BDRC
- Another version in Mongolian script available through the Library of Congress
- The Bodhisatvacaryavatara
- Excerpts from the Lalitavistara Sutra (includes scans of the original Mongolian text)
Note: it is best to study Mongolian in transliteration first before moving on to texts written in Mongolian script, because the script is ambiguous and does not differentiate between several different sets of letters. By learning Mongolian in transliteration, you will naturally acquire a passive knowledge of which exact letters are used in a given word.
Texts in Mongolian script:
- The Kanjuur
- There is also a Kanjuur catalogue available online through the University of Vienna, which tells you the volume and page number of texts in the above Kanjuur. For some reason, the catalogue’s Tibetan text doesn’t seem to be searchable and the Mongolian transliteration is bizarre, so it’s best to search in Devanagari. You can search for Tibetan texts and find the corresponding Devanagari on the AIBS website.
- Note: the Danjuur doesn’t seem to have been completely digitized yet.
- The Lamrim Chenmo
- Milarepa’s biography
- A commentary on the Sakya Lekshe
- The Great Liberation through Hearing
- The Wheel of Weapons Mind-Training
- A nitishastra (secular ethics) text by Nagarjuna
- The Meghadhuta, a play by Kalidasa
Other resources:
- Writing Mongol in Uighur Script (i.e. traditional Mongolian script)
- Making Sense of the Traditional Mongolian Script
- Traditional Guidelines for Translating Buddhist Texts
- Lexicographical Resources of the Mongolian Language (including a dictionary)
- Mongolian proverbs (some are the same as Tibetan proverbs)
Mongolian transcription
I am going to summarize the transcription system that I will use for Mongolian.
Its goals are as follows:
- avoid diacritics and special characters
- transcribe traditional Mongolian script
- to transcribe the underlying word, not to faithfully transliterate the glyphs of the script
It uses the following substitutions to avoid diacritics and special characters:
- ö>oe
- ü>ue
- q>kh
- γ>gh
- š>sh
- č>c
- ǰ>j
These substitutions follow established transcription customs from languages like German, Arabic, and Tibetan.
The Mongolian script is defective, containing ambiguous letters that could (in theory at least) be read in multiple different ways. The following chart shows which distinctions are made in the script. The distinctions that are not made in the script must instead be supplied by the reader by checking reliable sources such as Mongolian dictionaries. The source used to resolve ambiguous letters should be clearly cited.
| Letter pair | Initially distinct | Medially distinct | Finally distinct |
| a | e | Yes | No, but can be inferred based on vowel harmony | No, but can be inferred based on vowel harmony |
| o | u | No | No | No |
| oe | ue | No | No | No |
| o/u | oe/ue | Yes | Only sometimes (i.e. when #C_); otherwise can be inferred based on vowel harmony | No, but can be inferred based on vowel harmony |
| kh | gh | Sometimes (in some texts) | Sometimes (in some texts) | Sometimes (in some texts) |
| s | sh | Sometimes (in some texts) | Sometimes (in some texts) | Sometimes (in some texts?) |
| t | d | ? | No | No |
| c | j | Yes | No | N/A (no final c or j) |
| j | y | Sometimes (in some texts) | Yes | N/A (no final j) |
| i | y | ? | ? | ? |
| k | g | Sometimes (in some texts) | Sometimes (in some texts) | Sometimes (in some texts) |
Vowel harmony is sometimes described in such a way that makes it seem like the distinction between kh/gh and k/g is superfluous, the former occurring in words with back vowels (and i) and the latter in words with front vowels, but this is not the case. There are many words where velar stops occur together with back vowels (and i):
- ga: the name of a year
- kabalik: a city
- galab (Skt.): eon, age
- garudi (Skt.): a miraculous bird
- kijaghar: border, edge, end, shore, bank
- kilghasu(n): hair
- kilinca: sin, fault
- kimura: to be troubled, be disorderly
- kimusu(n): claws
- kidu: to cut, kill
- kshan (Skt.): moment, instant
- gorshisha (Skt.): a type of sandalwood
- (Source: Groenbech & Krueger p.69-70)
Conversely, I could not find any examples of words where velar fricatives occur together with front vowels.
Related reading:
Romanizing Mongolian (Janhunen)
A new approach to the Romanization of Written Mongol (Balk + Janhunen)
Diacritic marks in the Mongolian script and the ‘darkness of confusion of letters’ (Jugder)
Proposal to encode one historical Mongolian letter for Buryat Mongolian (West, Zhamsoev + Zeytsev)
Proposal to encode two Mongolian letters (Sanlig, Togoobat + Enkhtur)
Mongolian language spoken in Inner Mongolia