“저항력 없는” 어휘

Words with insufficient resistibility: With special reference to the findings in the field researches on endangered Mongolian languages

Some words are found in almost all the Mongolian languages and dialects, in the form which are traced back to their Middle Mongolian or Written Mongolian forms. They are words for ‘human’, ‘name’, ‘sun’, ‘day’, ‘head’, ‘nose’, ‘ear’, ‘tongue’, ‘neck’, ‘finger/ toe’, ‘nail’, ‘heart’, ‘cattle’, ‘horse’ ‘sheep’, ‘hare’, ‘snake’, ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘yellow’, ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘blood’, ‘excrement’, ‘urine’, ‘to have a bowel movement’, ‘to urinate’, ‘I(first person singular)’, etc. Some other words have been replaced by other elements, mainly foreign borrowings. This paper calls the former group “Words with sufficient resistibility” and the latter group “Words with insufficient resistibility” for the time being, and introduce the words which belong to the latter group. “Words with insufficient resistibility” includes those words for heavenly body, four directions, four seasons, kinship terms, one digit numbers, personal pronouns, parts of human body, etc. “Hyper generalization” in the languages in danger of disappearing are briefly mentioned. Some examples which show the disagreement between the good memory for the native words and the real use of the mother tongue are also introduced.