Editing Mongolic languages (section)

====Changes in morphology====

=====Nominal system=====
[[File:Secret history.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.13|alt=white page with several lines of black Chinese characters running top-down and separated into small groups by spaces. To the left of some of the characters there are small characters such as 舌　and 中. To the right of each line, groups of characters are indicated as such by a "<nowiki>]]</nowiki>"-shaped bracket, and to the right of each such bracket, there are other medium-sized characters|''[[The Secret History of the Mongols]]'' which goes back to a lost Mongolian script original is the only document that allows the reconstruction of agreement in social gender in Middle Mongol.<ref>Tümenčečeg 1990.</ref>]]

In the ensuing discourse, as noted earlier, the term "Middle Mongol" is employed broadly to encompass texts scripted in either Uighur Mongolian (UM), Chinese (SM), or Arabic (AM).

The case system of Middle Mongol has remained mostly intact down to the present, although important changes occurred with the comitative and the dative and most other case suffixes did undergo slight changes in form, i.e., were shortened.<ref>Rybatzki (2003b): 67, Svantesson (2003): 162.</ref> The Middle Mongol comitative -''luɣ-a'' could not be used attributively, but it was replaced by the suffix -''taj'' that originally derived adjectives denoting possession from nouns, e.g. ''mori-tai'' 'having a horse' became ''mor<nowiki>'</nowiki>toj'' 'having a horse/with a horse'. As this adjective functioned parallel to ''ügej'' 'not having', it has been suggested that a "privative case" ('without') has been introduced into Mongolian.<ref>Janhunen (2003c): 27.</ref> There have been three different case suffixes in the dative-locative-directive domain that are grouped in different ways: -''a'' as locative and -''dur'', -''da'' as dative<ref>Rybatzki (2003b): 68.</ref> or -''da'' and -''a'' as dative and -''dur'' as locative,<ref>Garudi (2002): 101–107.</ref> in both cases with some functional overlapping. As -''dur'' seems to be grammaticalized from ''dotur-a'' 'within', thus indicating a span of time,<ref>Toɣtambayar (2006): 18–35.</ref> the second account seems to be more likely. Of these, -''da'' was lost, -''dur'' was first reduced to -''du'' and then to -''d''<ref>Toɣtambayar (2006): 33–34.</ref> and -''a'' only survived in a few frozen environments.<ref>Norčin ''et al.'' (ed.) 1999: 2217.</ref> Finally, the directive of modern Mongolian, -''ruu'', has been innovated from ''uruɣu'' 'downwards'.<ref>Sečenbaɣatur ''et al.'' (2005): 228, 386.</ref> Social gender agreement was abandoned.<ref>Rybatzki 2003b: 73, Svantesson (2003): 166.</ref>

=====Verbal system=====
Middle Mongol had a slightly larger set of declarative finite verb suffix forms<ref>Weiers (1969): Morphologie, §B.II; Svantesson (2003): 166.</ref> and a smaller number of participles, which were less likely to be used as finite predicates.<ref>Weiers (1969): Morphologie, §B.III; Luvsanvandan (1987): 86–104.</ref> The linking converb -''n'' became confined to stable verb combinations,<ref>Luvsanvandan (ed.) (1987): 126, Činggeltei (1999): 251–252.</ref> while the number of converbs increased.<ref>Rybatzki (2003b): 77, Luvsanvandan (ed.) (1987): 126–137</ref> The distinction between male, female and plural subjects exhibited by some finite verbal suffixes was lost.<ref>The reconstruction of a social gender distinction is fairly commonplace, see e.g. Rybatzki (2003b): 75. A strong argument for the number distinction between -''ba'' and -''bai'' is made in Tümenčečeg (1990): 103–108, also see Street (2008) where it is also argued that this has been the case for other suffixes.</ref>