Mongolian script
Encyclopedia
The classical Mongolian script (in Mongolian script: 
Mongγol bičig; in Mongolian Cyrillic
: Монгол бичиг, Mongol bichig), also known as Uyghurjin, was the first writing system
created specifically for the Mongolian language
, and was the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946. Derived from Uighur, 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, Sibe
and, experimentally, Evenki.
to write the Mongolian language. It was introduced by the Uyghur
scribe
Tatar-Tonga, who had been captured by the Mongols during a war against the Naimans
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 [dʒ] and [j], while medial tsadi stood for both [dʒ] and [tʃ], and there was no letter for [d] in initial position. Mongolian sources often distinguish the early forms by using the term Uyghurjin script Mongolian for Uyghur style script). Western sources tend to use this term as a synonym for all variations of the Mongolian script.
The middle period of the development of Mongolian extended from the seventh and eighth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Mongolian language of this period is divided into southern. eastern and western dialects. The principal monuments of the middle period are: in the eastern dialect, the famous 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; intervocal consonants Y/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 Mongolian script look like a vertical Arabic script (in particular the presence of the dots 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 tsadi became associated with [dʒ] and [tʃ] respectively, and in the 19th century, the Manchu hooked yodh was adopted for initial [j]. Zain was dropped as it was redundant for [s]. Various schools of orthography, some using diacritic
s, were developed to avoid ambiguity.
Mongolian is 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.
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.
. It was also used in the ancient Manchurian
documents before diacritics were added and the Manchu script was derived. Most recently, an experimental alphabet for Evenki was created in the 1980s.
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.
. A variant is still used to write Xibe
. It is also used for Daur
.
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. 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.
, 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).
Standard in September, 1999 with the release of version 3.0.
, and Ali Gali, as well as extensions for transcribing Sanskrit
and Tibetan
.
operating system in 2007, and so Unicode Mongolian is not yet widely used. In China, legacy encodings such as the Private Use Area (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.
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. Currently there are no fonts that successfully display all of Mongolian 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 was, in the supplier's own words, "almost unusable", and as of 2011 there remain some serious bugs with the rendering of suffixes in Mozilla Firefox
.
Mongγol bičig; in Mongolian CyrillicMongolian Cyrillic alphabet
The Mongolian Cyrillic script is the writing system used for the Khalkha dialect of the Mongolian language as the standard dialect of the modern state of Mongolia. Cyrillic has not been adopted by the Khalkha in the Inner Mongolia region of China, who still use the Mongolian script.Mongolian...
: Монгол бичиг, Mongol bichig), also known as Uyghurjin, was the first writing system
Mongolian alphabet
Many alphabets have been devised for the Mongolian language over the centuries, and from a variety of scripts. The oldest, called simply the Mongolian script, has been the predominant script during most of Mongolian history, and is still in active use today in the Inner Mongolia region of China...
created specifically for the Mongolian language
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
, and was the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946. Derived from Uighur, Mongolian is a true alphabet, with separate letters for consonants and vowels. The Mongolian script has been adapted to write languages such as Oirat
Oirat language
Oirat belongs to the group of Mongolic languages. Scholars differ as to whether Oirat is a distinct language or a major dialect of the Mongolian language...
and Manchu
Manchu language
Manchu is a Tungusic endangered language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus...
. Alphabets based on this classical vertical script are used in Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in the northern region of the country. Inner Mongolia shares an international border with the countries of Mongolia and the Russian Federation...
and other parts of China to this day to write Mongolian, Sibe
Xibe language
The Xibe language is the most widely spoken of the Tungusic languages spoken by members of the Xibe ethnic group in Xinjiang, in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.-Phonology:...
and, experimentally, Evenki.
History
The Mongolian vertical script was developed as an adaptation of the Uyghur scriptOld Uyghur alphabet
The Old Uyghur alphabet was used for writing the Old Uyghur language, a variety of Old Turkic spoken in the Tarim basin, which is an ancestor of the modern Uyghur language. It was descendant of the Sogdian alphabet, used for texts with Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian content for 700–800 years in...
to write the Mongolian language. It was introduced by the Uyghur
Uyghur language
Uyghur , formerly known as Eastern Turk, is a Turkic language with 8 to 11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other...
scribe
Scribe
A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. 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-Khitan, 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 [dʒ] and [j], while medial tsadi stood for both [dʒ] and [tʃ], and there was no letter for [d] in initial position. Mongolian sources often distinguish the early forms by using the term Uyghurjin script Mongolian for Uyghur style script). Western sources tend to use this term as a synonym for all variations of the Mongolian script.
The middle period of the development of Mongolian extended from the seventh and eighth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Mongolian language of this period is divided into southern. eastern and western dialects. The principal monuments of the middle period are: in the eastern dialect, the famous 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; intervocal consonants Y/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 Mongolian script look like a vertical Arabic script (in particular the presence of the dots 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 tsadi became associated with [dʒ] and [tʃ] respectively, and in the 19th century, the Manchu hooked yodh was adopted for initial [j]. Zain was dropped as it was redundant for [s]. Various schools of orthography, some using diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s, were developed to avoid ambiguity.
Mongolian is written vertically
Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts
Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts can be oriented in either direction, as they consist mainly of disconnected syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space...
. 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.
Letters
Alphabets
The inventory of Mongol letters has been used to as alphabet for at least four languages. First and foremost, after overcoming the Uyghur script ductus, it was used for MongolianTraditional Mongolian alphabet
The traditional or classical Mongolian alphabet, sometimes called Hudum 'traditional' in Oirat in contrast to the Clear script , is the original form of the Mongolian script used to write the Mongolian language...
. It was also used in the ancient Manchurian
Manchu language
Manchu is a Tungusic endangered language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus...
documents before diacritics were added and the Manchu script was derived. Most recently, an experimental alphabet for Evenki was created in the 1980s.
Clear script (Oirat alphabet)
In 1648, the Oirat Buddhist monk Zaya-pandita NamkhaijamcoZaya Pandit
Zaya Pandita or Namkhaijantsan was a Buddhist missionary priest and scholar of Oirat origin who is the most prominent Oirat Buddhist scholar....
created this variation with the goals of bringing the written language closer to the actual pronunciation of Oirat
Oirat language
Oirat belongs to the group of Mongolic languages. Scholars differ as to whether Oirat is a distinct language or a major dialect of the Mongolian language...
and making it easier to transcribe 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 the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
and Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
. The script was used by the Kalmyks of Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
until 1924, when it was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. In Xinjiang
Xinjiang
Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...
, China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, the Oirat people
Oirats
Oirats are the westernmost group of the Mongols who unified several tribes origin whose ancestral home is in the Altai region of western Mongolia. Although the Oirats originated in the eastern parts of Central Asia, the most prominent group today is located in the Republic of Kalmykia, a federal...
still use it.
Manchu alphabet
The Manchu alphabet was developed from the Mongolian script in the early 17th century to write the Manchu languageManchu language
Manchu is a Tungusic endangered language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus...
. A variant is still used to write Xibe
Xibe language
The Xibe language is the most widely spoken of the Tungusic languages spoken by members of the Xibe ethnic group in Xinjiang, in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.-Phonology:...
. It is also used for Daur
Daur language
The Daur or Dagur language is a Mongolic language primarily spoken by members of the Daur ethnic group.-Distribution:Daur is a Mongolic language consisting of four dialects: Amur Daur in the vicinity of Heihe, the Nonni Daur on the west side of the Nonni River from south of Qiqihaer up to the Morin...
.
Buryat alphabet
Another alphabet, sometimes called Vaghintara, was created in 1905 by the BuryatBuryats
The Buryats or Buriyads , numbering approximately 436,000, are the largest ethnic minority group in Siberia and are mainly concentrated in their homeland, the Buryat Republic, a federal subject of Russia...
monk Agvan Dorjiev (1854–1938). It was also meant to reduce ambiguity, and to support the Russian language
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
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. 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.
Galik characters
In 1587, the translator and scholar Ayuush Güüsh created the Galik alphabet , inspired by the third Dalai LamaDalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...
, Sonam Gyatso. It primarily added extra characters for transcribing 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 the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
and Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
terms when translating religious texts, and later also from Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
. Some of those characters are still in use today for writing foreign names (compare table above).
Unicode
Mongolian script was added to the UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
Standard in September, 1999 with the release of version 3.0.
Block
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 properManchu alphabet
The Manchu alphabet was used for recording the now near-extinct Manchu language; a similar script is used today by the Xibe people, who speak a language descended from Manchu...
, and Ali Gali, as well as extensions for transcribing Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
and Tibetan
Tibetan script
The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Denzongkha, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday...
.
Issues
Although the Mongolian script has been defined in Unicode since 1999, there was no support for Unicode Mongolian from the major vendors until the release of the Windows VistaWindows Vista
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
operating system in 2007, and so Unicode Mongolian is not yet widely used. In China, legacy encodings such as the Private Use Area (PUA) Unicode mappings and GB18030 mappings of the Menksoft IMEs
Menksoft IMEs
Menksoft Mongolian IME is an input method editor made by Menksoft for typing Mongolian writing systems such as:*Mongolian script**Uyghur style Mongolian script...
(espc. Menksoft Mongolian IME) are more commonly used than Unicode for writing web pages and electronic documents in Mongolian.
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. Currently there are no fonts that successfully display all of Mongolian 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 was, in the supplier's own words, "almost unusable", and as of 2011 there remain some serious bugs with the rendering of suffixes in Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
.
