A Sketch of the Earliest Mongolic Language: the Brāhmī Bugut and Khüis Tolgoi Inscriptions

Abstract

The present article deals with the earliest known sources on a Mongolic language discovered in 2014 by the international team Dieter Maue (Germany), Mehmet Ölmez (Turkey), Étienne de La Vaissière and Alexander Vovin (both France) on two inscriptions. The importance of this discovery is three-fold: first, it gives us a glimpse of the earliest Mongolic language, predating by more than six hundred years the hitherto known earliest monument in a Mongolic language; second, in spite of the fact that the language of the inscriptions is somewhat close to Middle Mongolian, it provides the evidence of certain features that were previously only suggested for reconstructed forms of Mongolic; and finally, it significantly changes our general understanding of the mediaeval ethnolinguistic history of Central Asia.