Mongolian alphabet

Mongolian alphabet may refer to any of three scripts used over the centuries to write the Mongolian language. The most recent Mongolian alphabet is a slightly modified Cyrillic alphabet.

Mongolian alphabet proper

At the very beginning of the Mongol Empire in 1208, Genghis Khan defeated the Naimans and captured an Uyghur scribe, Tatar-Tonga, who then adapted the Uyghur alphabet — a descendant of the Syriac alphabet, via Sogdian — to write Mongol. With only minor modification, it is used in Inner Mongolia to this day. Its most salient feature is its vertical direction; it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uighurs rotated their script 90 degrees counterclockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.

This alphabet fails to make several vowel (o/u, ö/ü, final a/e) and consonant (t/d, k/g, sometimes ž/y) distinctions of Mongol that were not required for Uighur. The result is somewhat comparable to the situation of English, which must represent 10 or more vowels with only 5 letters, and uses the digraph th for two distinct sounds. However, two regional variants of the Mongol script use diacritics to represent all phonemic distinctions unambiguously: the western Todo script derived by Zaya Pandit around 1648 for the Oirats and Kalmyks, and still in use today among Mongols in the Dzungaria region of Xinjiang; and its recent offshoot, a northern Buryat script developed in 1905.

Besides the Mongolian language, the Evenk language is written in the Mongolian script.

Phagspa

The traditional Mongolian alphabet is not a perfect fit for the Mongolian language, and it would be impractical to extend it to a language with a very different phonology like Chinese. Therefore, during the Yuan Dynasty (ca. 1269), Kublai Khan asked a Tibetan monk, Phagspa, to design a new alphabet for use by the whole empire. Phagspa extended his native Tibetan script to encompass Mongolian and Chinese; the result was known by several descriptive names, such as the Mongolian seal script, but today is known as the Phagspa alphabet. This script did not receive wide acceptance and fell into disuse with the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368. After this it was mainly used as a phonetic gloss for Mongolians learning Chinese characters. However, scholars such as Gari Ledyard believe that in the meantime it was the source of the Korean Hangul alphabet.

For the purpose of encoding in digital media, Phagspa characters are allocated a block of 56 characters from U+A840 to U+A87F, and they will be available in Unicode 5.0, scheduled to be published sometime (after February) in 2006.

Cyrillic

The most recent Mongolian alphabet is a slightly modified Cyrillic alphabet (the Russian alphabet plus 2 letters, Өө /ö/ and Үү /ü/). It is a phonemic alphabet, meaning that there is a high level of consistency in the representation of individual sounds. It was introduced following the communist revolution in Mongolia and is used in everyday life and on the Internet.

External links

Alphabetic writing systems | Mongolian culture

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