The common features of Buryat and Khamnigan Mongol: the fate of the Mongolic *s

The aim of paper is to clarify whether the same process occurs or whether it is the result of independent development in these languages. This question is important because for a long time Khamnigan Mongol was considered a Buryat dialect and an originally Tungusic language which was assimilated by the Mongolian and Buryat people. The latest investigations have proven that Khamnigan Mongol is as an ‘original’ Mongolic language, it is a separate and independent language among other Mongolic languages and cannot be considered a Buryat dialect. The paper also discusses a special group of Buryat and Khamnigan Mongol words where the original Mongolic consonant *s is atypically preserved and is left unchanged by phonetic rules.