Abstract
As Japanese or Korean, Mongolian has a very rich system of symbolic words. Among these words, especially the ones describing various kinds of shapes and states of things are notably developed and used widely in order to express delicate nuances.
These expressions are also characteristic of the language from the morphological point of view. They can not appear withoutderivational suffixes, however they may be used..as verbs, adverbs, or adjectives. This is the character that the other types of symbolic words do not share.
The roots of these words can be further analyzed into three “submorphemes”, the term used by D. Bolinger, by which he means the configurations of phonemes common to some words which have same symbolic meanings. The first of these three submorphemes is aprefixal consonant, which seems uncommon for this dominantly suffixing language. The existence of these submorphemes suggests that in this suffixing language, symbolic words are freer in word-formation than nonsymbolic words. And they may also perhaps have a classificatory character in a wider sense of the word.
The author also suggests that there might be some relationship in meanings or in word-formation between the vocalic changes in symbolic words and those in others.
