Review of The Phonology of Mongolian

This book describes the phonology of Halh (Khalkha) Mongolian in detail, and provides an overview of ten other modern Mongolic languages (Buriad, Kamnigan, Oirad/Kalmuck, Dagur, Shira Yugur, Monguor, Santa, Bonan, Kangjia and Moghol). Its empirical focus is on vowel harmony, epenthesis and syllabification, laryngeal oppositions, reduplication, loanword phonology, historical vowel shifts and consonantal phonemicisation. The book largely takes a historical-comparative approach, and is presented within the framework of CV Phonology (Clements & Keyser 1983), with a highly articulatorily based approach to features (à la Wood 1979, e.g. [velar], [pharyngeal], [palatal] as features corresponding to action of the styloglossus, hyoglossus and genoglossus muscles respectively). The authors (henceforth STKF) form a team of experts on historical phonology, Old Mongolic texts, and prosody and intonation; the second author is a native speaker of Mongolian. In this review I will provide an overview of the phonology of Mongolian, based on the book, and attempt to make clear the importance of the phenomena for phonological typology and phonological theory. What follows will be a description of Halh, the standard dialect of Ulaanbaatar, unless otherwise noted.1

[pag-as] ' team-ABL ' (vs. [pa2-as] ' small-ABL'). Halh has the lateral fricative /N/, but no plain /l/, and voiced /g gj 2/, but no /k kj q/. The glide /w/ developed from Old Mongolian *p postvocalically, hence w is mostly not found initially (though in loanwords e.g. waar ' tile ') from Chinese) and p is mostly only found initially and after [m w N] (p. 29). They can contrast underlyingly /aNp/ 'service ' vs. /aN-w/ ' to kill-PAST', but on the surface the latter will undergo epenthesis, becoming [aN@w]. A series of palatalised consonants (/pjH tjH pj tj gj xj mj nj lj rj wj/) derive historically from a following *i (p. 28), to be discussed further below.

Vowels
Halh contrasts long and short vowels (though there is no short /e/, and short /o/ may be closer to [k] ; p. 4). According to STKF, long vowels are found only in initial syllables (p. 22). Although STKF do not commit themselves as to where main word stress is (' our conclusion is that word stress is not phonologically relevant in Mongolian ' (p. 96)), one might infer that since the long-short vowel contrast is only in the initial syllable, this is where stress is located. 3 In non-initial syllables the distinction is not between long and short, but rather between full and reduced vowels. While full vowels in non-initial syllables derive historically from long vowels, in Modern Halh they are equal in duration to initial short vowels (p. 3). Thus, even though they are written as doubled vowels in Cyrillic (e.g. >,=,-' my'), they are represented as short by STKF: [mini] (p. 25). Reduced vowels in non-initial syllables are centralised variants of the vowel in the preceding syllable (p. 6), unless preceded by an alveopalatal sibilant or a palatalised consonant, in which case they are [i]-like (p. 23). STKF claim that these reduced vowels are inserted epenthetically (ch. 6), and thus Cyrillic $/,< [aCiN] ' work' is underlyingly /aCN/ (p. 25). 4 (1) Vowel inventory of Halh  Gordon (1999) and Kim (2005)
Halh has a bimoraic minimal word requirement (p. 78), satisfied either by coda consonants or long vowels. It allows two-consonant codas that obey a sonority decrease, and has place assimilation of nasals in codas, except for [m], which can occur before coronal stops. It allows three-consonant codas where the first element is either a sonorant or /g/ (but not /2/), the second is a fricative and the third a coronal stop, such as  (pp. 207-208). As STKF note, this flip-flop might result if the partial devoicing effect that preaspirated stops have on preceding vowels (mentioned above in w1) could be reinterpreted as postaspiration of the initial consonant (cf. Ohala 1981). Again, the fact that /s/ patterns with the aspirated stops in all of these processes is further evidence of its [+spread glottis] character.

Loanword phonology
As a result of the consonantal inventory and phonotactics of Halh, loanwords from Russian can undergo a number of processes of phonological restructuring. Since there is no initial /r/, loanwords such as [oradjiP] 'radio' are usually pronounced with an initial vowel ([araC@w]; p. 30 Stressed vowels in Russian become long vowels in Mongolian (e.g. long in initial syllables and full/phonemic in non-initial syllables ; p. 32). They also determine the vowel harmony class of the word.

Reduplication
Halh has fixed-segment coda w (p. 58) for intensive adjective reduplication. Vowel length and the second half of diphthongs are ignored in the reduplicant, 11 leading STKF to adopt a CV-slot analysis, along the lines of Marantz (1982). Note that the fixed segment is a p in the Turkish equivalent (Kelepir 2000), as well as in Eastern Mongolian dialects (p. 59), and recall that Halh postvocalic *p has gone to /w/. Nouns can form echo reduplication, with the associative plural semantics (' X and such things ', ' X and people like him/her ', with a slightly pejorative flavour). This is formed by an m-prefix that appears in the onset of the reduplicant (12a), unless the base begins with m, in which case it is [ts] (12b). This process cannot be treated as complete overwriting of the onset in the reduplicant, because of the interesting fact that palatalisation is transferred from the corresponding consonant in the base (p. 60) when m-is chosen, resulting in [mj] (12c). However, as /ts/ has no palatalised counterpart, no transfer occurs when [mj] is the base (12d).
The statement of palatalisation preservation requires a representation in which the secondary articulation of the base is preserved even under replacement of the primary features of the consonant (as STKF note on page 61, this supports a representation where palatalisation is on a separate tier), and is deleted if incompatible with the primary articulation. 12

Concluding remarks
A large portion of the book consists of comparative tables of words in Old Mongolian and the eleven modern Mongolic languages, as well as tables showing vowel and consonant developments in schematic format. In my opinion, an accompanying CD or website would make these much easier to traverse and search for particular patterns. The authors refrain from developing theoretical models of many of the phenomena (in contrast to most other volumes in this series), but they do organise the presentation of the phenomena in a way that makes them accessible for interested researchers of all stripes. In addition to its own important empirical contributions, given the paucity of literature on the phonology of Mongolian in English, this book is a useful synthesis of much existing literature (it contains twelve detailed pages of annotated notes on sources and literature written in Mongolian, Russian, Chinese and other languages). The sketches of the non-Halh Mongolic languages are limited but informative. The authors do not attempt a genetic subclassification of the Mongolic languages, doubting the appropriateness of a family tree model for this, in light of the complicated history of language contacts (p. 217).
The book as a whole is organised in a way that is challenging for a linear reading (e.g. there is a presentation of Kalmuck orthography in Chapter 4 before we know anything about Kalmuck; there is no discussion of stress until Chapter 7; presentation of loanword phonology -which could have been a chapter in its own right -comes before the epenthesis rules are introduced). It is worth the effort, however : many of the phenomena mentioned above have not yet been given a full treatment in contemporary phonological theories of vowel harmony, syllabification, reduplication or loanword phonology, making this book a ripe source for interested researchers.