Mongolian Qa ᠬ

Qa is the transliteration used here for the velar stop as it is pronounced in words of the back vowel class, and it is the twelfth letter of the alphabet. The transliteration uses q rather than k in order to keep it apart from the corresponding front class form, and the distinction it marks is one of the clearest demonstrations of how far vowel harmony reaches into Mongolian. The velar consonant a word takes is governed by the vowels around it, so a back class word takes this letter and a front class word takes the other, and a speaker does not choose between them any more than the vowels are chosen.

Unicode encodes qa at U+182C. In writing, its shape is close to that of the voiced velar which follows it in the alphabet, and the two are separated by dots which ordinary writing does not always supply. That gives the letter two layers of context dependence at once: which velar is meant depends on marks that may be absent, and which pronunciation is meant depends on the class of the word. Neither is a difficulty for a reader who knows the word, and both are obstacles for a reader who does not, which is the characteristic profile of this script. The letter is common in native vocabulary and is one of the shapes a learner meets in the first lesson, usually taught together with the voiced velar rather than separately, because learning the pair as a pair is the only way the dots make sense.

Vowel harmony is named for the vowels, but in Mongolian it does not stop there. The velar consonants come in a back class form and a front class form, and which one appears is settled by the vowels of the word rather than by anything independent. That makes the harmony a property of the whole word rather than of its vowels alone, and it is why grammars speak of back words and front words rather than of back vowels and front vowels. A suffix crossing onto a word must match it in both respects, presenting its front vowels and its front velar to a front word and its back series to a back word, so a single suffix may have two or more written forms with no difference in meaning.

For a reader of the script this is useful redundancy. The class of a word is signalled several times over, by the vowels that are distinguished, by the velar chosen, and by the form of any suffix present, so an ambiguous vowel shape in the middle of a word is usually resolved by evidence elsewhere in the same word. Systems of this kind are found across the languages of northern and central Asia, and the resemblance among Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages in this respect is one of the observations that started a long and still unsettled argument about whether they are related or merely neighbours.