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Ruined Words, Evasive Referents, and Emic Phonemes in Mongolian Riddles, Part 1

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2014

Abstract

Examining two major corpuses of Mongolian riddles, references continually arose to a particular word category. Termed evdersen u'g (literally: 'ruined words'), these words were semantically evasive, their meaning far from obvious, particularly joined to the other 'obfuscating techniques' of Mongolian riddles, such as ellipsis.

This paper, presented in two parts, examines these 'ruined words' from several different viewpoints.