Mongolian script

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Mongolian script

Mongolian script was the first of many writing systems created for the Mongolian language

Mongolian language

The Mongolian language is the best-known member of the Mongolic languages. It is the language of most residents of Mongolia and of many of the Mongolian residents of Inner Mongolia, totalling about 5.7 million speakers....
and the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic to Mongolia in 1946. With minor modification, the classic vertical script is used in Inner Mongolia

Inner Mongolia

Inner Mongolia is the Mongols autonomous region of China of the People's Republic of China, located in the country's north.Inner Mongolia borders, from east to west, the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Ningxia, and Gansu, while to the north it borders Mongolia and Russia....
in China

People's Republic of China

The People's Republic of China , commonly known as China, is the largest country in East Asia and the List of countries by population in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately a fifth of the world's population....
to this day to write both Mongolian and the Evenki language.

Mongol vertical script is essentially the Uyghur script

Old Uyghur alphabet

The Old Uyghur alphabet was used for writing the Uyghur language. It was descendant of the Sogdian alphabet, used for texts with Buddhist, Manichaeism and Christian content for 700?800 years in Uyghurstan....
used to write Mongol.

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Encyclopedia

Mongolian script was the first of many writing systems created for the Mongolian language

Mongolian language

Inner Mongolia

People's Republic of China

History

The Mongol vertical script is essentially the Uyghur script

Old Uyghur alphabet

Uyghur language

Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a Central Asian region administered by People's Republic of China....
scribe

Scribe

A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing....
Tatar-Tonga, who had been captured by the Mongols during a war against the Naimans

Naimans

The Naimans, also Naiman Turks or Naiman Mongols, was a Mongolian name given to a group of people dwelling on the steppe of Central Asia, having diplomatic relations with the Kara-Khitai, and subservient to them until 1177....
around 1204. There were no substantive changes to the Uyghur form for the first few centuries, so that, for example, initial yodh stood for both and , while medial tsadi stood for both and , and there was no letter for in initial position. 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 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 diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. The term derives from the Greek language d?a???t???? ....
s, were developed to avoid ambiguity.

In 1587, Ayuush Güüsh devised a number of extra characters to transcribe the sounds of foreign languages like Tibetan

Tibetan language

The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering South Asia, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan....
, Chinese

Chinese language

Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
, and Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
. This extension is known under the name Ali-Gali .

Mongolian is written vertically

Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts

Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. The Chinese character, Japanese writing system and Hangul scripts can be oriented in either direction, while the traditional Mongolian language and its offshoots are written vertically....
. The Uyghur script and its descendants—Mongolian, Oirat Clear, Manchu, and Buryat—are the only 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 characters

Characters take different shapes depending on their initial, medial, or final position within a word. In some cases, there are additional graphic variations which are selected for better visual harmony with the subsequent character.

The alphabet fails to make several vowel (o/u, ö/ü, final a/e) and consonant (t/d, k/g, sometimes ž/y) distinctions of Mongolian that were not required for Uyghur. The result is somewhat comparable to the situation of English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
, which must represent ten or more vowels with only five letters and uses the digraph

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph, bigraph , or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined....
th for two distinct sounds. Sometimes, ambiguity is avoided, because the requirements of vowel harmony and syllable sequence usually determine the right choice. Moreover, as there are few words with an exactly identical spelling, actual ambiguities are rare for a reader who knows the orthography.

Characters			Transliteration		Notes
initial	medial	final	Latin	Cyrillic	Notes
			a	?	Distinction usually by vowel harmony (see also q/? and k/g below)
			e	?
			i, yi	?,?, ?, ?	At end of word today often absorbed into preceding syllable
			o, u	?, ?	Distinction depending on context.
			ö, ü	?, ?	Distinction depending on context.
			n	?	Distinction from medial and final a/e by position in syllable sequence.
			ng	?, ??	Only at end of word (medial for composites). Transcribes Tibetan ?; Sanskrit ?.
			b	?, ?
			p	?	Only at the beginning of Mongolian words. Transcribes Tibetan ?;
			q	?	Only with back vowels
			?	?	Only with back vowels. Between vowels pronounced as a long vowel. The "final" version only appears when followed by an a written detached from the word.
			k	?	Only with front vowels, but 'ki/gi' can occur in both front and back vowel words Word-finally only g, not k. g between vowels pronounced as long vowel.
			g	?
			m	?
			l	?
			s	?
			š	?
			t, d	?, ?	Distinction depending on context.
			c	?, ?	Distinction between /t?'/ and /ts'/ in Khalkha Mongolian.
			j	?, ?	Distinction by context in Khalkha Mongolian.
			y	-?, ?, ?, ?, ?
			r	?	Not normally at the beginning of words.
			v	?	Used to transcribe foreign words (Originally used to transcribe Sanskrit ?)
			f	?	Used to transcribe foreign words
				?	Used to transcribe foreign words
			(c)		Used to transcribe foreign words (Originally used to transcribe Tibetan /ts'/ ?; Sanskrit ?)
			(z)		Used to transcribe foreign words (Originally used to transcribe Tibetan /dz/ ?; Sanskrit ?)
			(h)	(?, ?)	Used to transcribe foreign words (Originally used to transcribe Tibetan /h/ ?, ?; Sanskrit ?)
			(zh)	(-,-)	Transcribes Chinese 'zhi' - used in Inner Mongolia
			(r)	(-,-)	Transcribes Chinese 'ri' - used in Inner Mongolia
			(chi)	(-,-)	Transcribes Chinese 'chi' - used in Inner Mongolia

Examples

Historical shapes

Modern print type

Transliterating first word:


	v
	i
	k
	i
	p
	e
	d
	i
	y
	a

transliteration:
Cyrillic:
Transcription:
Gloss: Wikipedia free omni-profound mirror scripture is.
Translation: Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia.

Derivate scripts

Clear script

In 1648, the Oirat Buddhist monk Zaya-pandita Namkhaijamco

Zaya Pandit

Zaya Pandit or Namkhaijantsan was a Buddhist monk and scholar of Oirats origin who is the most prominent Oirat Buddhist scholar.Zaya Pandit was the fifth son of Babakhan, a minor Khoshut-Oirat prince....
created this variation with the goals of bringing the written language closer to the actual pronunciation and making it easier to transcribe Tibetan

Tibetan language

Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
. The script was used by Kalmyks of Russia

Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
until 1924, when it was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. In Xinjiang, China, the Oirat people still use it.

Vaghintara script

Another variant was developed in 1905 by a Buryat

Buryats

The Buryats or Buriyads, numbering approximately 436,000, are the largest ethnic minority group in Siberia and are mainly concentrated in their homeland, the Buryatia, a Federal subjects of Russia of Russia....
monk named Agvan Dorjiev (1854–1938). It was also meant to reduce ambiguity, and to support the Russian language

Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
in addition to Mongolian. The most significant change however was the elimination of the positional shape variations. All characters were based on the medial variant of the original Mongol script. After a few years, Agvan-Dorjiev ran out of funds to promote his invention further, so that fewer than a dozen books were printed using it.

Mongolian in Unicode

The Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
Mongolian block is U+1800 – U+18AF. It includes letters, digits and various punctuation marks for Mongolian, Todo script, Xibe, and Manchu, as well as extensions for transcribing Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
and Tibetan

Tibetan script

The Tibetan script is an abugida of Brahmic family origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language....
.

1800	1801	1802	1803	1804	1805	1806	1807	1808	1809	180A	180B	180C	180D	180E

1810	1811	1812	1813	1814	1815	1816	1817	1818	1819

1820	1821	1822	1823	1824	1825	1826	1827	1828	1829	182A	182B	182C	182D	182E	182F
1830	1831	1832	1833	1834	1835	1836	1837	1838	1839	183A	183B	183C	183D	183E	183F
1840	1841	1842	1843	1844	1845	1846	1847	1848	1849	184A	184B	184C	184D	184E	184F
1850	1851	1852	1853	1854	1855	1856	1857	1858	1859	185A	185B	185C	185D	185E	185F
1860	1861	1862	1863	1864	1865	1866	1867	1868	1869	186A	186B	186C	186D	186E	186F
1870	1871	1872	1873	1874	1875	1876	1877

1880	1881	1882	1883	1884	1885	1886	1887	1888	1889	188A	188B	188C	188D	188E	188F
1890	1891	1892	1893	1894	1895	1896	1897	1898	1899	189A	189B	189C	189D	189E	189F
18A0	18A1	18A2	18A3	18A4	18A5	18A6	18A7	18A8	18A9	18AA

Mongolian in Menksoft

Unfortunately, the de facto

De facto

De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning the fact" or in practice but not necessarily ordained by law. It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or technique that are found in the common experience as created or developed without or contrary to a regulation....
Mongolian code is not Unicode. In inner Mongolia, people use a software called Menksoft IME. The Menksoft Mongolian code use Private Use Area (PUA) of Unicode

Mapping of Unicode characters

Unicode?s Universal Character Set has a potential capacity to support over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is mapped to a code point which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111 used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software ....
and Chinese GB 18030

GB 18030

GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China superseding GB 2312. This character set is formally called "Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2005: Information technology -- Chinese coded character set"....
code.

External links

, including tutorial
Mongolian calligraphy