Mongolian A: The First Letter and the Open Back Vowel

A is the first letter of the traditional Mongolian alphabet and writes the open back vowel, the sound at the front of the word for father in most European languages. It belongs to the back class of the vowel harmony, and because it is first in the recited order it is the letter grammars reach for when they want to state that rule. Inside a word it is written as a plain tooth, one short stroke leaning off the vertical spine that runs down the middle of the column, and it is among the simplest shapes the script has. That simplicity is also what makes it hard to read, because a bare tooth is not exclusive to this letter and the word itself often has to settle which letter is meant. Like every letter here, a takes a different form at the beginning of a word, inside it, and at the end, and those three are positions of one letter rather than three separate letters: at the head of a word it is approached by a stroke that opens the column, and at the end it is drawn out into a long tail that closes it.

Unicode encodes it at U+1820 and follows the traditional recitation order, so the alphabet a Mongolian child learns and the alphabet a computer sorts are the same alphabet in the same sequence. As the first of the back vowels, a is also half of the alphabet's most characteristic pattern: a word of the back class draws its vowels from a, o and u, and a word of the front class takes the front series instead.