Mongolian Ue ᠦ

Ue is the transliteration used here for the rounded front vowel written u with an umlaut in scholarly transcription, and it is the seventh letter of the traditional alphabet. It belongs to the front class and completes the set of four rounded vowels: two back, two front, written with two shapes between them. Its shape is identical to that of the rounded front vowel written o with an umlaut, and the two are separated only by the word. Unicode encodes it at U+1826. With this letter the alphabet's native vowel inventory is complete at seven, and the consonants begin. Seven is the number to remember, because the letter that follows the consonants in the recited order, the further vowel written ee, stands outside the seven and outside the harmony system they belong to.

The four rounded vowels are also the point at which transliteration systems for Mongolian diverge most from one another. Some use o and u with umlauts, some use the letters with other diacritics, some spell them out as oe and ue, and some use entirely different conventions inherited from Russian or German scholarship. A reader comparing two books on the same subject should expect the same Mongolian word to look different in each, and should expect the difference to fall on exactly these vowels.

Anyone reading about Mongolia in a European language meets the same names spelled several ways, and the reason is not carelessness. There is no single agreed romanisation of Mongolian, and the competing systems differ in what they are trying to preserve. One kind of system transliterates the traditional script, letter by letter, so that the original spelling can be reconstructed from the roman text. It reproduces the script's ambiguities faithfully, including the undifferentiated rounded vowels, and it produces forms that look archaic because the traditional orthography preserves older pronunciations. Another kind transcribes the modern spoken language, usually by way of the Cyrillic orthography, and produces forms much closer to how the words sound today but with no route back to the traditional spelling. The two disagree systematically rather than randomly, and the rounded front vowels are among the places they disagree most visibly.

Library catalogues, scholarly editions and journalism each tend to a different convention, and a name that appears one way in a Buddhist studies monograph will often appear another way in a newspaper. The practical advice for a reader is to expect the variation, to note which system a given book has declared, and not to assume two spellings are two people.