ABSTRACT
Proto-Mongolic is the technical term for the common ancestor of all the living and historically attested Mongolic languages. By definition, Proto-Mongolic was spoken at a time when the differentiation of the present-day Mongolic languages had not yet begun. Like all protolanguages, Proto-Mongolic is an abstraction that can only be approached by the comparative and diachronic analysis of the synchronically known Mongolic languages. For the very reason that Proto-Mongolic is not actually attested our understanding of it will always remain imperfect. However, compared with many other Eurasian protolanguages, Proto-Mongolic is nevertheless relatively easily accessible due to the fact that the genetic relations between the Mongolic languages are even synchronically fairly transparent and, consequently, chronologically shallow.
