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. The relatively high frequency of such words in the Mongolian riddle corpus also seems related to a degree of phonetic lability in these riddles - and perhaps in spoken Mongolian as a whole - resulting in variations of riddles that are phonetically very close, yet nonetheless manifesting subtle shifts of meaning.
In addition, frequent occurrence of the words known as iconopoeia (du'rsleh u'g, literally, 'image-making words', 'depicting words') is found, as these words are also subject to distortion in riddles. In the first part of this paper, a preliminary attempt is made at categorizing these 'ruined' words, and distorted loan words were examined.
In the second part, I examine phonetically modified words, modified iconopoeia, iconopoeia with inserted zero phoneme, possibly 'lost' words, words that are semantically evasive or indiscernible, and emic phonemes in the context of Mongolian riddles. Some preliminary conclusions as to the possible phonic, semantic and cosmological functions of these distortions, omissions, and 'obsfucations' are drawn.