Mongolian Script

Introduction

The Mongolian script was added to the Unicode Standard in Unicode version 3.0 (September 1999). Unfortunately, the encoding model designed by experts from China and Mongolia is deeply flawed, so twenty years later there are still many unresolved issues with the implementation and display of Unicode Mongolian text. For an overview of the Unicode Mongolian encoding model, see the Mongolian block description in the Unicode Standard v. 5.0 (this version of the block description was written by me). For all Unicode Mongolian documents, including recent proposals to revise, improve or replace the current encoding model, see Topical Document List: Mongolian. For Mongolian Working Group documents see here.

The Mongolian block of Unicode (U+1800 through U+18AF) covers the characters needed to write the following related scripts:

• Mongolian
• Todo or Clear script (for the Kalmyk dialect of Mongolian)
• Manchu
• Sibe

The Todo and Manchu scripts are derived directly from the Mongolian script, whilst Sibe (which is a language closely related to Manchu) is a modification of the Manchu script. These three derative scripts share some common letters with Mongolian, but each have a number of modified letter forms or new letters, which are encoded separately.

Table 1 shows which Unicode characters in the Mongolian block are used to represent which script.

Notes

• 1878. Mongolian Letter Cha with Two Dots was added for Buryat Mongolian in Unicode version 11.0 (June 2018). See L2/17-007 for the proposal document.
• 18AA. Mongolian Letter Manchu Ali Gali Lha was added in Unicode version 5.1 (April 2008). See L2/06-013 for the proposal document.

Mongolian Script

The Mongolian script was derived from the Uighur script around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Uighur script, which was in use from about the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, was itself derived from Sogdian Aramaic, a Semitic script which was written in horizontal Right-To-Left lines. Probably under the influence of the Chinese script, the Uighur script became rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise so that the lines of text read vertically from left to right. The Mongolian script inherited this directionality from the Uighur script.

According to Mongolian tradition the Uighur script was adapted for use in writing the Mongolian langauge during the early years of the rule of Chinggis Qagan [Genghis Khan] (1162-1227), when the Uighur tutor of a defeated leader of the Turkic Naiman tribe was captured. The earliest extant Mongolian document is a stone inscription dateable to circa 1225, during the reign of Ghengkis Khan .

Despite being almost replaced by the Tibetan-inspired 'Phags-pa script during the reign of Kublai Khan (r.1260-1294), the Uighur-based Mongolian script continued in use throughout the period of Mongolian rule of China as the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). Unlike the Khitan and Jurchen scripts, which gradually fell into disuse after the fall of the Liao (907-1125) and Jin (1115-1234) dynasties respectively, the Mongolian script has continued in use right up to the present day.

The Mongolian script was replaced by a Cyrillic-based alphabet in the Mongolian Peoples Republic (Outer Mongolia) during the 1940s, but continued in use amongst the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia in China. The use of the Mongolian script is now being revived to an extent in Outer Mongolia.

The Uighur script, being derived from a Semitic alphabet, could not even represent the sounds of the Uighur language in full. When it was adapted to Mongolian, it inherited the same limitations, in as much as some letters could represent two different sounds, and the correct pronunciation could only be known from context. Although there were some reforms to the script over its centuries of use, the modern Mongolian script still possesses many of its original ambiguities. For example the letters for the vowel pairs "o/u" and "ö/ü"are not normally distinguished, whilst "o/u" are only normally distinguished from "ö/ü" in the first syllable of a word. Likewise the letters "t" and "d" are often indistinguishable. Thus the words urtu ᠤᠷᠲᠤ "long" and ordu ᠣᠷᠳᠤ "palace, camp, horde" are written identically (but encoded differently in Unicode, so that the nominal glyphs for the letters "o" and "u", "t" and "d" are different).

See my Mongolian Test Page for an example of a short piece of classical Mongolian.

Todo Script

The Todo script is a modified and improved version of the Mongolian script, devised in 1648 for use of the Oirat Mongolians in the western parts of the Qing empire. It is still in use by the Kalmyk Mongolians of Kalmykia (in Russia, west of the Volga, on the Northern shores of the Caspian Sea), as well as by speakers of the Kalmyk dialect in Xingjiang and Qinghai in China.

The name of the script "todo" ᡐᡆᡑᡆ, means "clear and distinct" in Mongolian, and refers to the attempt to remove some of the ambiguities inherent in the original Mongolian script.

Manchu Script

The Manchu people (manju ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ in Manchu) are descended from the Jurchen people, who ruled Northern China as the Jin ("Golden") dynasty from 1115 to 1234. Four hundred years later, in 1644, the Manchu tribes overthrew the Ming dynasty, and ruled China as the Qing dynasty until 1911.

Although the Jurchen had their own ideographic writing system inspired by the Chinese script, which in places continued in use until the early fifteenth-century, the Jurchen script had gone out of use long before the Manchu tribes united under Nurhachi (1559-1626) in the late sixteenth-century. Therefore, in 1599 the Manchu leader Nurhachi ordered Erdeni and Gagai to devise a new writing system to represent the Manchu language. As the Manchu homeland borders on Mongolia, and as Manchu belongs to the same Altaic family as Mongolian, it was natural to look towards the Mongolian script rather than the Chinese script for inspiration. In fact the script devised by Erdeni and Gagai was more or less a direct adaption of the unmodified Mongolian script for use in writing the Manchu language. This earliest form of the Manchu script is known in Manchu as tongki fuka akū hergen ᡨᠣᠩᡴᡳ ᡶᡠᡴᠠ ᠠᡴᡡ ᡥᡝᡵᡤᡝᠨ "writing without dots and circles", as it lacks the diacritical dots and circles used in the later script to distinguish certain letters. Few examples of this form of the Manchu script now survive.

In 1632, the great Manchu scholar Dahai (1595-1632) reformed the script by adding circles and dots to certain letters in order to distinguish their different sounds, and devising new letters to represent the sounds of the Chinese language. This reformed script is known in Manchu as tongki fuka sindaha hergen ᡨᠣᠩᡴᡳ ᡶᡠᡴᠠ ᠰᡳᠨᡩᠠᡥᠠ ᡥᡝᡵᡤᡝᠨ "writing with dots and circles", and has been used ever since.

Its importance as the mother tongue of the ruling dynasty meant that Manchu was an important written language during the Qing dynasty, and many books were printed in Manchu, especially translations of Chinese texts (see my Manchu Test Page for an example of an early Manchu translation of a Chinese novel).

However, due to the Sinification of the Manchu people over the last three hundred and fifty years, Manchu is now on the brink of extinction as a living language. There are still a few very old people in the Manchu homeland provices of Liaoning and Jilin that can still speak some Manchu, and some Manchu words are preserved in the Chinese speech of Manchu communities on the outskirts of Beijing and elsewhere, but the only places where Manchu is still spoken on a day-to-day basis is in some isolated Manchu communities located along the Amur and Nen rivers in the province of Heilongjiang in the far north-east of China. These communities are descended from Manchu border guards sent to the area from 1683 onwards to guard against Russian incursions. Up until the 1960s the population of these isolated communities was almost exclusively Manchu, and Manchu was used as the day-to-day language of young and old alike. However, over the past thirty years there has been a large influx of Chinese speakers into these areas, and the Manchu language is now only spoken by the older generation, understood but not spoken by the middle generation, and neither spoken nor understood by the younger generation.

The Unicode characters corresponding to the basic Manchu alphabet (i.e. omitting the Ali Gali letters used for transcribing Tibetan and Sanskrit) are presented in Table 2.

Sibe Script

The Sibe (also transliterated as Sibo or Xibo) people are closely related to the Manchus, and their language is often classified as a dialect of Manchu. However, as the Sibe people regard themselves as ethnically distinct from the Manchu people, their dialect of Manchu may perhaps best be considered to be a separate language.

There are about 84,000 members of the Sibe nationality, widely dispersed across Xinjiang, Lianning and Jilin due to deliberate programmes of ethnic dispersal during the Qing dynasty. The vast majority have become assimilited into the local population, and no longer speak the Sibe language. However, a population of about 18,000 members of the Sibe nationality who live in the Sibe Autonomous County in the Ili River valley in Western Xinjiang, the decendants of border guards posted to Xinjiang in 1764, still speak and write the Sibe language.

The Sibe script is based on the reformed Manchu script, with a few modified letters.

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