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[Seevocuda]

Does anyone know the true pronunciations of Mongolian names and words? For example, how would “cisun (blood)”, “morin (horse)” be pronounced? I need to know the vowels and consonants of the Mongolian language.

[yan]

Does anyone know the true pronunciations of Mongolian names and words? For example, how would “cisun (blood)”, “morin (horse)” be pronounced? I need to know the vowels and consonants of the Mongolian language.

It depends a bit on the region, and on the time I guess. For example, Outer Mongolians will usually use a 'z' (as in pinyin 'zaijian') when Inner Mongolians use a 'j' (as in English 'jungle').

If Khalkha Mongolian pronounciation is OK for you, it actually follows quite closely from the cyrillic. Or the other way round, the orthography was modeled after pronounciation. Wikipedia has a breakdown on how exactly those letters are supposed to match with the International Phonetic Alphabet: http://en.wikipedia....golian_Cyrillic . I guess г,л,р,о,ө,у,ү take some practice to get them really right. The stress is usually on first syllabe with a double vowel, and on the first syllabe if there is no double vowel.

Horse is pronounced like mör if you read the ö as in German 'böse', or like the 'i' in English 'girl'. The r has to rolled. Blood would be more like Tsus.

Inner Mongolian is usually somewhere between Khalkha Mongolian and what you would expect from reading words written in traditional Mongol script (or transliterations thereof) I guess. Generally traditional Mongolian script does not match very well with today's pronounciation. Just imagine it a bit like french.

A possible trap can be different transcription systems. For example the PRC now seems to use a system where the lation letters 'q' and 'x' are used analogously to Hanyu Pinyin, while people outside the PRC might read both letters more like 'kh' as in 'Khrushchev'.