Editing Mongolic languages (section)

=====Consonants=====
Research into reconstruction of the consonants of Middle Mongol has engendered several controversies. Middle Mongol had two series of plosives, but there is disagreement as to which phonological dimension they lie on, whether aspiration<ref>Svantesson ''et al.'' (2005)</ref> or voicing.<ref>Tömörtogoo (1992)</ref> The early scripts have distinct letters for velar plosives and uvular plosives, but as these are in complementary distribution according to vowel harmony class, only two back plosive phonemes, *''/k/'', *''{{IPA|/kʰ/}}'' (~ *''[k]'', *''{{IPA|[qʰ]}}'') are to be reconstructed.<ref>Svantesson ''et al.'' (2005): 118–120.</ref> One prominent, long-running disagreement concerns certain correspondences of word medial consonants among the four major scripts (''UM'', ''SM'', ''AM'', and ''Ph'', which were discussed in the preceding section). Word-medial ''/k/'' of Uyghur Mongolian (UM) has not one, but two correspondences with the three other scripts: either /k/ or zero. Traditional scholarship has reconstructed *''/k/'' for both correspondences, arguing that *''/k/'' was lost in some instances, which raises the question of what the conditioning factors of those instances were.<ref>Poppe (1955)</ref> More recently, the other possibility has been assumed; namely, that the correspondence between UM ''/k/'' and zero in the other scripts points to a distinct phoneme, ''/h/'', which would correspond to the word-initial phoneme ''/h/'' that is present in those other scripts.<ref>Svantesson ''et al.'' (2005): 118–124.</ref> ''/h/'' (also called ''/x/'') is sometimes assumed to derive from *''{{IPA|/pʰ/}}'', which would also explain zero in ''SM'', ''AM'', ''Ph'' in some instances where ''UM'' indicates /p/; e.g. ''[[Deel (clothing)|debel]]'' > Khalkha ''deel''.<ref>Janhunen (2003c): 6</ref>

The palatal affricates *''č'', *''čʰ'' were fronted in Northern Modern Mongolian dialects such as Khalkha. {{IPA|*''kʰ''}} was [[spirantization|spirantized]] to {{IPA|/x/}} in Ulaanbaatar Khalkha and the Mongolian dialects south of it, e.g. Preclassical Mongolian ''kündü'', reconstructed as ''{{IPA|*kʰynty}}'' 'heavy', became Modern Mongolian {{IPA|/xunt/}}<ref>Svantesson ''et al.'' (2005): 133, 167.</ref> (but in the vicinity of [[Bayankhongor]] and [[Baruun-Urt]], many speakers will say {{IPA|[kʰunt]}}).<ref>Rinchen (ed.) (1979): 210.</ref> Originally word-final *''n'' turned into /ŋ/; if *''{{IPA|n}}'' was originally followed by a vowel that later dropped, it remained unchanged, e.g. ''{{IPA|*kʰen}}'' became {{IPA|/xiŋ/}}, but ''{{IPA|*kʰoina}}'' became {{IPA|/xɔin/}}. After i-breaking, {{IPA|*[ʃ]}} became phonemic. Consonants in words containing back vowels that were followed by ''{{IPA|*i}}'' in Proto-Mongolian became [[Palatalization (phonetics)|palatalized]] in Modern Mongolian. In some words, word-final ''{{IPA|*n}}'' was dropped with most case forms, but still appears with the ablative, dative and genitive.<ref>Svantesson ''et al.'' (2005): 124, 165–166, 205.</ref>

Only foreign origin words start with the letter ''L'' and none start with the letter ''R''.<ref name="Ramsey1987">{{cite book|author=S. Robert Ramsey|title=The Languages of China|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2E_5nR0SoXoC&pg=PA206|year=1987|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=0-691-01468-X|pages=206–}}</ref>