| Mongolian script | |
| Sample: | M injinash.jpg |
| Caption: | Poem composed and brush-written by Injinash, 19th century |
| Languages: | Mongolian language |
| Creator: | Tata-tonga |
| Type: | Alphabet |
| Fam1: | Egyptian hieroglyphs |
| Fam2: | Proto-Sinaitic alphabet |
| Fam3: | Phoenician alphabet |
| Fam4: | Aramaic alphabet |
| Fam5: | Syriac alphabet |
| Fam6: | Sogdian alphabet |
| Fam7: | Old Uyghur alphabet |
| Children: | Manchu alphabet
Oirat alphabet (Clear script) |
| Time: | – 1941 (used as main script) 1941 – Present (used as co script) |
| Direction: | vertical up-to-down, left-to-right |
| Iso15924: | Mong |
The traditional Mongolian script, also known as the Hudum Mongol bichig, 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, it is a true alphabet, with separate letters for consonants and vowels. It has been adapted for such languages as Oirat and Manchu. Alphabets based on this classical vertical script continue to be used in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia to write Mongolian, Xibe and, experimentally, Evenki.
Computer operating systems have been slow to adopt support for the Mongolian script; almost all have incomplete support or other text rendering difficulties.
The Mongolian vertical script developed as an adaptation of the Old Uyghur alphabet for the Mongolian language.[1] Tata-tonga, a 13th-century Uyghur scribe captured by Genghis Khan, was responsible for bringing the Old Uyghur alphabet to the Mongolian Plateau and adapting it to the form of the Mongolian script.[2]
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 pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/ respectively, and in the 19th century, the Manchu hooked yodh was adopted for initial pronounced as /link/. Zain was dropped as it was redundant for pronounced as /link/. 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.[3]
The reed pen was the writing instrument of choice until the 18th century, when the brush took its place under Chinese influence.[4] Pens were also historically made of wood, 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.[5]
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.[6]
The script remained in continuous use by Mongolian speakers in Inner Mongolia in the 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.[7] [8] [9] However, due to the particularity of the traditional Mongolian script, a large part (40%[10]) of the Sinicized Mongols in China are unable to read or write this script, and in many cases the script is only used symbolically on plaques in many cities.[11] [12]
The script is known by a wide variety of names. As it was derived from the Old Uyghur alphabet, the Mongol script is known as the Uighur(-)Mongol script. From 1941 onwards, it became known as the Old Script, in contrast to the New Script, referring to Cyrillic. The Mongolian script is also known as the Hudum or 'not exact' script, in comparison with the Todo 'clear, exact' script, and also as 'vertical script'.[13] [14] [15] [16]
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.
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 neutral vowels. Any of these rules might not apply for foreign words however.[21]
A separated final form of vowels or is common, and can appear at the end of a word stem, or suffix. This form requires a final-shaped preceding letter, and an inter-word gap in between. This gap can be transliterated with a hyphen.[22] [23] [24] [25]
The presence or lack of a separated or can also indicate differences in meaning between different words (compare 'black' with 'to look').[26]
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.[27]
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. A maximum of two case suffixes can be added to a stem.
Such 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-shaped in the two-letter suffix / is exemplified in the adjacent newspaper logo.
Two medial consonants are the most that can come together in original Mongolian words. There are however, a few loanwords that can begin or end with two or more.
In the modern language, proper names (but not words) usually forms graphic compounds (such as those of 'Jasper-jewel' or – the city of Hohhot or 'Blue-city'). 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. Orthographic peculiarities are most often retained, as with the short and long teeth of an initial-shaped in 'Bad Girl' (protective name). Medial and , in contrast, are not affected in this way.[28]
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).
| Contextual forms | Transliteration | International Phonetic Alphabet | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Initial | Medial | Final | Latin | Mong. Cyrillic | Khalkha | Chakhar[29] | ||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ or pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| — | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| — | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ or pronounced as /link/ before | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| — | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| — | pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| — | pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
See main article: Galik alphabet.
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 (as listed below).[30]
In 1917, the politician and linguist Bayantömöriin Khaisan published the rime dictionary Mongolian-Han Bilingual Original Sounds of the Five Regions, a bilingual edition of the earlier Original Sounds of the Five Regions, to aid Mongolian speakers in learning Mandarin Chinese. To that end, he included transliterations of Mandarin using the Mongolian script, and repurposed three Galik letters to represent the Mandarin retroflex consonants. These letters remain in use in Inner Mongolia for the purpose of transcribing Chinese.[31]
| Contextual forms | Transliteration | IPA< | -- For Mongolian? --> | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Initial | Medial | Final | Latin | Mong. Cyrillic | Sanskrit | Tibetan[32] | |||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| — | — | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| — | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| — | — | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| — | — | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
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, to either symbolize emphasis or respect. Modern punctuation incorporates Western marks: parentheses; quotation, question, and exclamation marks; including precomposed and .
| Form(s) | Name | Function(s) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birga | Marks start of a book, chapter, passage, or first line | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| [...] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 'Dot'|Comma|-| style="text-align:center;" ||'Double-dot' | Period / full stop | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 'Four-fold dot'|Marks end of a passage, paragraph, or chapter|-| style="text-align:center;" ||'Dotted line' | Ellipsis | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Colon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
'Spine, backbone'|Mongolian soft hyphen |-| style="text-align:center;" ||Mongolian non-breaking hyphen, or stem extender |}NumeralsSee main article: Mongolian numerals.
Mongolian numerals are either written from left to right, or from top to bottom. For typographical reasons, they are rotated 90° in modern books to fit on the line. Components and writing stylesComponentsListed in the table below are letter components (graphemes) commonly used across the script. Some of these are used with several letters, and others to contrast between them. As their forms and usage may differ between writing styles, however, examples of these can be found under this section below.
|
. A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire . Wiley . 1998 . 978-0-631-20814-3 . 398 . David Christian (historian).