ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2823 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2823 ************************************ From: Roberd mac Cormaic 24 Apr 2004 Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked our help in evaluating ("majestic fox") as a name for a 12th or 13th century Mongol man. Specifically, you wanted assistance in the construction of this name, and a pronunciation. We warned you earlier that our sources for medieval Mongol names are very limited. In researching further, we've concluded that the article in which you found the elements of your name [1] contains some errors. We have no reason to doubt that the names themselves were used, but we do think that the spellings given in the article are inaccurate. We recommend you spell the name in Roman letters as , where stands for the letter u-umlaut, a with a diareses (pair of dots) over it. This change is required by a characteristic of all the Mongolian languages. This characteristic, called vowel harmony, restricts the combinations of vowels that can occur in a single word or name. In particular, if the vowel of the second syllable is , that of the first syllable cannot be , but it can be . We therefore think it very likely that and are careless transcriptions of what should be and . (We have no reason to doubt that the transcriptions are otherwise correct.) Assuming that the stress (accent) rules of Middle Mongolian were the same as those of modern Khalkha Mongolian, the name was pronounced roughly \SU"-ren U"-neh-ghen\.[2] Here the \U"\ stands for a vowel not used in English; it is the sound of the in French 'on' and of the u-umlaut in the German word "to feel". \gh\ also represents a sound foreign to English: It is the voiced version of the raspy sound in Scottish or German . (The unvoiced sound is related to \gh\ in the same way that \k\ is related to hard \g\.) I hope this letter is of some use to you. I was extensively assisted in the construction of this letter by Talan Gwynek, Arval Benicoeur, Maridonna Benvenuti, Aryanhwy merch Catmael, Kolozsvari Arpadne Julia, Adelaide de Beaumont and Juliana de Luna. For the Academy, -Roberd mac Cormaic 24 Apr 2004 ____________________ References: [1] Baras-aghur Naran "On the Documentation and Construction of Period Mongolian Names" (WWW: privately published, date unknown) http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/baras-aghur/mongolian.html [2] Our main reference for the modern pronunciation is Alan J.K. Sanders & Jantsangiin Bat-Ireedu"i, _Colloquial Mongolian_ (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 13, 15.