Hans-Peter Vietze
University of Weimark
The Language of Middle-Mongolian Rhymes
35th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, 1992
To begin with we try to confirm by statistical comparison of linguistic phenomena that some ‘alliterated passages of Blo bzan bstan ‘jin’s “Altan Tobči” originally belonged to the “Secret History of the Mongols”, so that a larger version of the “Secret History” than is now known must have existed in the past.
Secondly, we try to show that the language of these rhymes differs by lexical, syntactic, and morphological features from the language of the common Middle-Mongolian prose. In many cases it is possible to show that the alliterated passages represent an older state of the language than was used in the middle of the 13th century.