ON MONGOLIC BELGE AND MENGGE ‘SIGN, MARK’
ON MONGOLIC BELGE AND MENGGE ‘SIGN, MARK’

Summary/Abstract: In Mongolic, the words belge and mengge have practically the same meaning, cf. LM belge ‘sign mark, token, symptom, symbol; prognostic, omen’ and LM mengge ‘birthmark, mole; sign’. This paper aims to answer the question of whether these two words are etymologically related with each other or not, and also attempts to shed light on a question put forward by Gerhard Doerfer. In two of his works Doerfer (1992; 1993) suggested that there might be loanwords in Early Turkic taken from different Mongolic languages, but this idea has gone practically unnoticed in the Altaistic literature.

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