BÉLA KEMPF

Past stages of linguistic history for Mongolic languages as a language family can be attained through linguistic reconstruction. As languages change continuously, the researchers of Mongolic Historical Linguistics need some practical devices, with the help of which different periods in the history of the Mongolic languages are accessible, making it easier to work with chronologically diverse data. These devices depend on the written monuments at our disposal and our methods used during linguistic reconstruction.

For example, it is interesting to observe that as many researchers, almost as many opinions appear in the scientific literature regarding the meaning of the term Middle Mongol, actually one of the most general terms in our scientific field. But problems are not less concerning the periods before or after the Middle Mongol, or in the case of modern Mongolic languages.

Recently major discoveries were in the field of the Mongolic languages spoken prior to the Mongol Empire. Having yet no better means, we put all these data under the term Old Mongol. The picture of the Mongolic languages of this period, however, seems to be much more diverse, so the term Old Mongol does not create a clear shortcut to the peculiarities of the Mongolic languages of the period.

The periodization of the Modern Mongolic languages is not without problems as well. Questions, like when does the history of the independent Khalkha language begin, are not properly answered by the  My presentation will be twofold. I would like to speak briefly about the theoretical questions and problems of periodization, and also check if the theoretical questions are in harmony with the present ideas of the periodization of Mongolic language history. In the second part of my presentation, I will give a brief survey of the views regarding the periodization of the history of the Mongolic languages as they appear in the works of different prominent researchers in the area, and will also try to enumerate the problems, that should be agreed upon to create a commonly accepted basis of future scientific conversation.