Mongolian Ba: The Voiced Bilabial Stop

Ba writes the voiced bilabial stop, the sound made by closing both lips and releasing them with the voice on, and it is the tenth letter of the alphabet. It is one of the most straightforward letters here: the sound is common, native, unrestricted in position, and distinctly written. Unicode encodes it at U+182A. Its form is worth attention because it shows how the script hangs together. Traditional Mongolian is written in vertical columns, and every letter of a word attaches to a continuous vertical spine running down the middle of the column.

A word is therefore a single connected object rather than a row of separate signs, and each letter is a set of strokes departing from that spine and returning to it. The bilabial stop is drawn as a bowl or hook off the spine, closed at the point where the next letter continues downward. Because the spine is continuous, the shape a letter takes depends on what has to happen before and after it, which is the practical reason for the three positional forms every letter carries. Writing this script is closer to writing a joined European hand than to setting separate types, and the calligraphic tradition that grew around it treats a word as one gesture.