A Comparative Study Of Grammatical Suffixes Of Nominal In Oroqen And Mongolian

The both of Oroqen nationality and the Mongol nationality are the minorities living in the northern grasslands in China, which have long histories. The both of the Oroqen language and the Mongolian language belong to Altaic Family of Languages, and the former belongs to Manchu-Tungusic Group while the latter belongs to the Mongolic Group. Each of the Oroqen nationality and the Mongol nationality has their own language, but the former has not yet created its own writing system up to now.Consulting academic works published in China and elsewhere, the present author summarizes the research conclusions concerning the grammatical categories of "case","number","possessive&reflexive forms" and "degree of comparison" in Oroqen and Mongolian. Based on the field work by the author herself, the grammatical categories of nominals in the Oroqen language are discussed with the methods of descriptive linguistics. On that basis, similar grammatical meanings and phonetic forms of "case","number","possessive&reflexive forms" as well as "degree of comparison" known from the two languages are also analyzed using the methods of diachronic linguistics in the present dissertation. Lastly, origins of some suffixes related to the grammatical categories of nouns and adjectives in the two languages are researched as well.By comparative researching on the issues, this dissertation has reached the following conclusions:1. According to the grammatical meanings and phonetic forms of case declension in Oroqen language, the cases in the language are reclassified.2. In the process of summarizing survey materials, the author discovers the locative case suffixes-lI:/-li and-du1I:/-duli, the mini-plural suffix-χar/-χ9r/-χor, the augmentative suffixes-rgI/r-gi and-lI/-lI of adjectives, which have not been mentioned earlier. 3. The ancient phonetic form of the genitive case in the Oroqen language can be reconstructed as*-In/*-in, which is probably a cognate of*-in/*-in in the Mongolian language.4. In both of the Manchu-Tungusic Group and the Mongolic Group, the locative case suffixes originally have relations with the locative suffixes of spatials and pronouns.5. In the Oroqen language, there are special suffixes for the double number, mini-plurality and macro-plurality. It is possible that the mini-plurality existed in both of the ancient Manchu-Tungusic languages and the Mongolic languages.6. The possessive suffixes for the first and second persons singular and plural in the Oroqen language basically evolved from the first and second personal pronouns singular and plural respectively. The inclusive possessive suffix for the first person plural evolved from the personal pronoun for the first person plural is-tir, which is formed with the last syllable of the plural pronoun for the first person miti and the plural suffix-r attached. The suffixes for the third person singular and plural in the Oroqen language mainly evolved from the personal pronouns for the third person singular and plural, the first syllables of which dropped.7. The suffix for the singular reflexive form in the Oroqen language evolves from the personal pronoun for the first person singular. The suffix for the plural reflexive form originates from the pronoun for the first person singular, to which a plural suffix is attached.8. There are not only some common elements concerning the grammatical categories of "case","number","possessive&reflexive forms" and "degree of comparison" in Oroqen and Mongolian, but even some phonetically corresponding forms exist between the two languages. From the visual angle of the comparative study between grammatical categories of nominals in the two languages, it is obvious that the Oroqen language and the Mongolian language are with close relations.