Mongolian script

The classical or traditional Mongolian script, also known as the , was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most widespread until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946. It is traditionally written in vertical lines . Derived from the Old Uyghur alphabet, Mongolian is a true alphabet, with separate letters for consonants and vowels. The Mongolian script has been adapted to write languages such as Oirat and Manchu. Alphabets based on this classical vertical script are used in Inner Mongolia and other parts of China to this day to write Mongolian, Xibe and experimentally, Evenki.
Computer operating systems have been slow to adopt support for the Mongolian script, and almost all have incomplete support or other text rendering difficulties.
History.
The Mongolian vertical script developed as an adaptation of the Old Uyghur alphabet for the Mongolian language. From the seventh and eighth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Mongolian language separated into southern, eastern and western dialects. The principal documents from the period of the Middle Mongol language are: in the eastern dialect, the famous text "The Secret History of the Mongols", monuments in the Square script, materials of the Chinese–Mongolian glossary of the fourteenth century, and materials of the Mongolian language of the middle period in Chinese transcription, etc.; in the western dialect, materials of the Arab–Mongolian and Persian–Mongolian dictionaries, Mongolian texts in Arabic transcription, etc. The main features of the period are that the vowels "ï" and "i" had lost their phonemic significance, creating the "i" phoneme (in the Chakhar dialect, the Standard Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, these vowels are still distinct); inter-vocal consonants "γ"/"g", "b"/"w" had disappeared and the preliminary process of the formation of Mongolian long vowels had begun; the initial "h" was preserved in many words; grammatical categories were partially absent, etc. The development over this period explains why the Mongolian script looks like a vertical Arabic script (in particular the presence of the dot system).
Eventually, minor concessions were made to the differences between the Uyghur and Mongol languages: In the 17th and 18th centuries, smoother and more angular versions of the letter "tsadi" became associated with and respectively, and in the 19th century, the Manchu hooked "yodh" was adopted for initial . "Zain" was dropped as it was redundant for . Various schools of orthography, some using diacritics, were developed to avoid ambiguity.
Traditional Mongolian is written vertically from top to bottom, flowing in lines from left to right. The Old Uyghur script and its descendants, of which traditional Mongolian is one among Oirat Clear, Manchu, and Buryat are the only known vertical scripts written from left to right. This developed because the Uyghurs rotated their Sogdian-derived script, originally written right to left, 90 degrees counterclockwise to emulate Chinese writing, but without changing the relative orientation of the letters.
The reed pen was the writing instrument of choice until the 18th century, when the brush took its place under Chinese influence. Pens were also historically made of wood, reed, bamboo, bone, bronze, or iron. Ink used was black or cinnabar red, and written with on birch bark, paper, cloths made of silk or cotton, and wooden or silver plates.
Mongols learned their script as a syllabary, dividing the syllables into twelve different classes, based on the final phonemes of the syllables, all of which ended in vowels.
The script remained in continuous use by Mongolian speakers in Inner Mongolia in People's Republic of China. In the Mongolian People's Republic, it was largely replaced by the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet, although the vertical script remained in limited use. In March 2020, the Mongolian government announced plans to increase the use of the traditional Mongolian script and to use both Cyrillic and Mongolian script in official documents by 2025.
Names.
The traditional Mongolian script is known by a wide variety of names. Because of its similarity to the Old Uyghur alphabet, it became known as the "Uigurjin Mongol script". During the communist era, when Cyrillic became the official script for the Mongolian language, the traditional script became known as the "Old Mongol script", in contrast to the "New script", referring to Cyrillic. The name "Old Mongol script" stuck, and it is still known as such among the older generation, who didn't receive education in the new script.
Overview.
The traditional or classical Mongolian alphabet, sometimes called "Hudum" 'traditional' in Oirat in contrast to the Clear script ("Todo" 'exact'), is the original form of the Mongolian script used to write the Mongolian language. It does not distinguish several vowels ('/', '/', final '/') and consonants (syllable-initial '/' and '/', sometimes '/') that were not required for Uyghur, which was the source of the Mongol (or Uyghur-Mongol) script. The result is somewhat comparable to the situation of English, which must represent ten or more vowels with only five letters and uses the digraph "th" for two distinct sounds. Ambiguity is sometimes prevented by context, as the requirements of vowel harmony and syllable sequence usually indicate the correct sound. Moreover, as there are few words with an exactly identical spelling, actual ambiguities are rare for a reader who knows the orthography.
Letters have different forms depending on their position in a word: initial, medial, or final. In some cases, additional graphic variants are selected for visual harmony with the subsequent character.
The rules for writing below apply specifically for the "Mongolian" language, unless stated otherwise.
Vowel harmony.
Mongolian vowel harmony separates the vowels of words into three groups – two mutually exclusive and one neutral:
Any Mongolian word can contain the neutral vowel "", but only vowels from either of the other two groups. The vowel qualities of visually separated vowels and suffixes must likewise harmonize with those of the preceding word stem. Such suffixes are written with "front" or neutral vowels when preceded by a word stem containing only neutal vowels. Any of these rules might not apply for foreign words however.
Separated final vowels.
A separated final form of vowels ' or ' is common, and can appear at the end of a word, word stem, or suffix. This form requires a final-shaped preceding consonant and an inter-word gap in between. This gap can be transliterated with a hyphen. In digital typesetting, these forms are triggered by inserting a between the consonant and vowel.
The presence or lack of a separated ' or ' can also indicate differences in meaning between different words (compare ' 'black' with ' 'to look').
Its form could be confused with that of the identically shaped "traditional" dative-locative suffix '/' exemplified further down. That form however, is more commonly found in older texts, and more commonly takes the forms of '/' or '/' instead.
Separated suffixes.
All case suffixes, as well as any plural suffixes consisting of one or two syllables are likewise separated by a preceding and hyphen-transliterated gap. In digital typesetting, this gap is represented by a . A maximum of two case suffixes can be added to a stem.
Single-letter vowel suffixes appear with the final-shaped forms of '/', ', or '/', as in ' 'to the country' and ' 'on the day', or ' 'the state' etc. Multi-letter suffixes most often start with an initial- (consonants), medial- (vowels), or variant-shaped form (medial/variant-shaped ' in the two-letter suffix '/"" being exemplified in the adjacent newspaper logo).
Compound names.
In the modern language, proper names (but not words) usually forms graphic compounds (such as those of ' 'Jasper-jewel' or ' – the city of Hohhot). These also allow components of different harmonic classes to be joined together, and where the vowels of an added suffix will harmonize with those of the latter part of the compound. Ortographic peculiarities are most often retained, as with a preceding "tooth" or following "shin" of initial vowels: ' 'Bad Girl' (protective name). Medial ', in contrast, is not affected in this way.
Isolate citation forms.
Isolate citation forms for syllables containing ', ', ', and ' may in dictionaries appear without a final tail as in '/' or '/', and with a vertical tail as in '/' or '/' (as well as in transcriptions of Chinese syllables).
Notes on letter tables.
A dash indicates a non-applicable position for that letter.
Parentheses enclose glyphs or positions whose corresponding sounds are not found in native Mongolian words.
Palatalized phonemes have been excluded. These are conditioned by a following "i".
Components.
Listed in the table below are script components (graphemes) that are recurring, contrasting, or both. The actual use and appearance of these may differ greatly between letterforms of different writing styles, however. For examples to compare between, see § Writing styles further down.
Punctuation.
When written between words, punctuation marks use space on both sides of them. They can also appear at the very end of a line, regardless of where the preceding word ends. Red (cinnabar) ink is used in many manuscripts, either to symbolize emphasis or respect. Modern puncuation incorporates Western marks: parentheses; quotation, question, and exclamation marks; as well as precomposed and .
Numerals.
Mongolian numerals are either written from left to right, or from top to bottom.
Examples.
Writing styles.
As exemplified in this section, the shapes of glyphs may vary widely between different styles of writing and choice of medium with which to produce them. The development of written Mongolian can be divided into the three periods of "pre-classical" (beginning – 17th century), "classical" (16/17th century – 20th century), and "modern" (20th century onward):
Child systems.
The Mongol script has been the basis of alphabets for several languages. First, after overcoming the Uyghur script ductus, it was used for Mongolian itself.
Clear script (Oirat alphabet).
In 1648, the Oirat Buddhist monk Zaya-pandita Namkhaijamco created this variation with the goals of bringing the written language closer to the actual pronunciation of Oirat and making it easier to transcribe Tibetan and Sanskrit. The script was used by the Kalmyks of Russia until 1924, when it was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. In Xinjiang, China, the Oirat people still use it.
Manchu alphabet.
The Manchu alphabet was developed from the Mongolian script in the early 17th century to write the Manchu language. A variant is still used to write Xibe. It is also used for Daur. Its folded variant may for example be found on Chinese Qing seals.
Vagindra alphabet.
Another alphabet, sometimes called "Vagindra" or "Vaghintara", was created in 1905 by the Buryat monk Agvan Dorjiev (1854–1938). It was also meant to reduce ambiguity, and to support the Russian language in addition to Mongolian. The most significant change, however, was the elimination of the positional shape variations. All letters were based on the medial variant of the original Mongol alphabet. Fewer than a dozen books were printed using it.
Evenki alphabet.
The Qing dynasty Qianlong Emperor erroneously identified the Khitan people and their language with the Solons, leading him to use the Solon language (Evenki) to "correct" Chinese character transcriptions of Khitan names in the History of Liao in his "Imperial Liao Jin Yuan Three Histories National Language Explanation" (欽定遼金元三史國語解/钦定辽金元三史国语解 Qīndìng Liáo Jīn Yuán Sānshǐ Guóyǔjiě) project. The Evenki words were written in the Manchu script in this work.
In the 1980s, an experimental alphabet for Evenki was created.
Additional characters.
Galik characters.
In 1587, the translator and scholar Ayuush Güüsh () created the Galik alphabet (), inspired by the third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso. It primarily added extra characters for transcribing Tibetan and Sanskrit terms when translating religious texts, and later also from Chinese. Some of those characters are still in use today for writing foreign names (compare table above).
Unicode.
Mongolian script was added to the Unicode standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0. However, there are multiple design issues in Mongolian Unicode that have not been fixed until now. The model is extremely unstable and the user group dislike the 1999 design.
Blocks.
The Unicode block for Mongolian is U+1800–U+18AF. It includes letters, digits and various punctuation marks for Hudum Mongolian, Todo Mongolian, Xibe (Manchu), Manchu proper, and Ali Gali, as well as extensions for transcribing Sanskrit and Tibetan.
The Mongolian Supplement block (U+11660–U+1167F) was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2016 with the release of version 9.0:
Font issues.
Although the Mongolian script has been defined in Unicode since 1999, there was no native support for Unicode Mongolian from the major vendors until the release of the Windows Vista operating system in 2007 and fonts need to be installed in Windows XP and Windows 2000 to show properly, and so Unicode Mongolian is not yet widely used. In China, legacy encodings such as the Private Use Areas (PUA) Unicode mappings and GB18030 mappings of the Menksoft IMEs (espc. Menksoft Mongolian IME) are more commonly used than Unicode for writing web pages and electronic documents in Mongolian. In addition, unlike the usual vertical format, computers tend to show the script in right-to-left lines by default.
The inclusion of a Unicode Mongolian font and keyboard layout in Windows Vista has meant that Unicode Mongolian is now gradually becoming more popular, but the complexity of the Unicode Mongolian encoding model and the lack of a clear definition for the use variation selectors are still barriers to its widespread adoption, as is the lack of support for inline vertical display. As of 2015 there are no fonts that successfully display all of Mongolian correctly when written in Unicode. A report published in 2011 revealed many shortcomings with automatic rendering in all three Unicode Mongolian fonts the authors surveyed, including Microsoft's Mongolian Baiti.
Furthermore, Mongolian language support has suffered from buggy implementations: the initial version of Microsoft's Mongolian Baiti font (version 5.00) was, in the supplier's own words, "almost unusable", and as of 2011 there remain some minor bugs with the rendering of suffixes in Firefox. Other fonts, such as Monotype's "Mongol Usug" and Myatav Erdenechimeg's "MongolianScript", suffer even more serious bugs.
In January 2013, Menksoft released several OpenType Mongolian fonts, delivered with its Menksoft Mongolian IME 2012. These fonts strictly follow Unicode standard, i.e. "bichig" is no longer realized as "B+I+CH+I+G+FVS2" (incorrect) but "B+I+CH+I+G" (correct), which is not done by Microsoft and Founder's "Mongolian Baiti", Monotype's "Mongol Usug", or Myatav Erdenechimeg's "MongolianScript". However, due to the impact of Mongolian Baiti, many still use the Microsoft defined incorrect realization "B+I+CH+I+G+FVS2", which results in an incorrect rendering in correctly-designed fonts like "Menk Qagan Tig".
Mongolian script can be represented in LaTeX with the MonTeX package.
Sometimes even if a font is installed the script may display as horizontal rather than vertical depending on the operating system or font.
Samples.
The text samples below should match their image counterparts. This ensures that a text in Mongolian script is being rendered somewhat properly. The specific example letters given here are:
Note that in some browsers, letters are rotated 90° counterclockwise. If an isolate letter "" () resembles a 'W' and not a 'Σ', rotate the letters 90° clockwise.