Mongolian writing systems

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 and de facto use in Mongolia. It has spawned several alphabets, either as attempts to fix its perceived shortcomings, or to allow the notation of other languages, such as Sanskrit and Tibetan. In the 20th century, Mongolia first switched to the Latin script, and then almost immediately replaced it with the Cyrillic script for compatibility with the Soviet Union, its political ally of the time. Mongols in Inner Mongolia and other parts of China, on the other hand, continue to use alphabets based on the traditional Mongolian script.

Precursors

The Xianbei spoke a proto-Mongolic language and wrote down several pieces of literature in their language. They are believed to have used Chinese characters to phonetically represent Xianbei like the Japanese system of Man'yōgana but all works written in Xianbei are now lost.

Mongolian

Mongolian primarily means "of or pertaining Mongolia", a landlocked country in East and Central Asia that borders Russia to the north and People's Republic of China to the south, east and west.

Mongolian may also refer to:

See also

Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet

The Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet (Mongolian: Монгол Кирилл үсэг, Mongol kirill üseg or Mongolian: Кирилл цагаан толгой, Kirill tsagaan tolgoi) is the writing system used for the standard dialect of the Mongolian language in the modern state of Mongolia. It has a largely phonemic orthography, meaning that there is a fair degree of consistency in the representation of individual sounds. Cyrillic has not been adopted as the writing system in the Inner Mongolia region of China, which continues to use the Traditional Mongolian script.

History

Mongolian Cyrillic is the most recent of the many writing systems that have been used for Mongolian. It is a Cyrillic alphabet and is thus similar to, for example, the Bulgarian alphabet, and identical to the Russian alphabet except for the two additional characters Өө ⟨ö⟩ and Үү ⟨ü⟩.

It was introduced in the 1940s in the Mongolian People's Republic under Soviet influence, after a brief period where Latin was used as the official script. After the Mongolian democratic revolution in 1990, the traditional script was briefly considered to replace Cyrillic, but it has not come to fruition. Nevertheless, Mongolian script has become a compulsory subject in primary and secondary school and is slowly gaining popularity. The Mongolian script is a highly unusual vertical script, and unlike for example Chinese script, cannot easily be adapted for horizontal use, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to Cyrillic for many modern uses. Thus, the Cyrillic script continues to be used in everyday life and on the Internet.

Mongolian language

The Mongolian language (in Mongolian script: ,Mongɣol kele; in Mongolian Cyrillic: Монгол хэл, Mongol khel) is the official language of Mongolia and largest-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 10 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. In Mongolia, the Khalkha dialect, written in Cyrillic (and at times in Latin for social networking), is predominant, while in Inner Mongolia, the language is dialectally more diverse and is written in the traditional Mongolian script. In the discussion of grammar to follow, the variety of Mongolian treated is Standard Khalkha Mongolian (i.e., the standard written language as formalized in the writing conventions and in the school grammar), but much of what is to be said is also valid for vernacular (spoken) Khalkha and other Mongolian dialects, especially Chakhar.

Some classify several other Mongolic languages like Buryat language, Oirat language as a dialect of Mongolian but this classification is not in line with the current international standard.

Mongolian script

The classical Mongolian script (in Mongolian script: ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ Mongγol bičig; in Mongolian Cyrillic: Монгол бичиг Mongol bichig), also known as Hudum Mongol bichig, 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 Sogdian, 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.

History

The Mongolian vertical script developed as an adaptation of the Sogdian to 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 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 (in Chahar dialect, the Standard Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, they're still distinct); intervocal 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 Mongolian script looks like a vertical Arabic script (in particular the presence of the dots system).