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FOREIGN DEMONS IN MONGOLIAN AND CENTRAL ASIAN BUDDHISM THROUGHOUT THE TIME Methodology and Linguistic Part From linguistic point of view the initial liquid /- can be used as a good tool, because phonotactically it did not occur at the beginning of Old Turkic and Common Mongolian words.’ Also in Chinese and other contact languages the initial /- has higher frequency in this position. It means that in Mongolian the proportion of loanwords beginning with /- is higher than in the case of words beginning with other consonants. In Khalkha Mongolian there are mostly three source languages of borrowed words beginning with /-, mostly Chinese, Tibetan and Indo-European — usually Russian. The list of words extracted from the dictionary of Bawden’ offers few examples, here divided according to source-languages. From Chinese: e.g. Jaa "candle", 2aaz “tin”, 2uup “pear”, nyy “Dragon”, nanxya “Lotus/ Water-lily”; for source-words cf. Old Turkic below. From Tibetan: zasup “baldachin / canopy”
