About the original form of The Secret History of the Mongols
(63rd Annual Meeting Ulaanbaatar, 2021)
The Secret History of the Mongols, the pride of the Mongols, recorded the historical events belong to the XIII century on the land of Mongols. Unfortunately, it keeps many secrets until now because of scarce historical facts. For instance, we can mention so many questions such as by which letter the manuscript of The Secret History of the Mongols was written, when it was written by whom, whether it was written or oral literature.
Researchers are interested in what language The Secret History of the Mongols is written in. The article proposes interesting facts about The Secret History of the Mongols based on our and scientists research work. In particular, we are assuming that The Secret History of the Mongols was the best-known Mongolian literary masterpiece, which was originally raised in the form of oral literature and later written. The proof is that the first part of The Secret History of the Mongols is written in the form of a Mongolian folk heroic epistles, and many oral kinds of literature have been used. The richness of the oral tradition of the Mongols is based on the foundations of the Mongolian people who have accumulated for many generations, so The Secret History of the Mongols has a variety of expressions such as oral and written language, local dialect, and so on. Furthermore, the 282 part “yeke qurilta quriǰu quluqana ǰil quran sara-da Kelüren-ü Köde’e-aral-un Dolo’an-boldaq-a Šilgincek qoyar ǰa’ura ordos bawuju büqüi-ṭür biciǰü dawusba” of The Secret History of the Mongolsindicates that this was later recorded. And it mentioned the place and date that the book was written but the writer did not appear. Thus, it shows that it was originally raised in the form of oral literature and later written. In this article, the author mentioned nine facts to prove her statement.
The written language of any nation is relatively stable and has the role of regulating various pronunciations of spoken language to an extent. On the other hand, some interesting phonetic changes of the Mongolian language were noted in the Secret History of the Mongols. For example, phenomena such as the formation of the long vowels, assimilation, vowel alternation, and consonant alternation noted the state of the spoken language of the time. Given these points, it is not optimal to consider that the Secret History of the Mongols was originally written literature.