Mongolian Ee: The Vowel Outside the Seven

Ee is a further vowel letter that stands outside the seven vowels carrying the Mongolian vowel harmony. The seven, from a through the rounded front vowels, form a closed and symmetrical system: a back series, a front series and one neutral vowel. This letter belongs to none of those positions. It is an addition to a system that was already complete, and it is best understood as evidence that the alphabet has continued to be adjusted rather than frozen at the moment of its adoption.

Unicode encodes it at U+1827, immediately after the seventh vowel and before the consonants, which places it at the seam between the inherited core and everything added later. Letters of this kind accumulate in any long lived script. An alphabet is used to write more than the language it was designed for: it writes loanwords, foreign names, dialect forms and the pronunciations of a later century, and each of those pressures can leave a sign behind. The Mongolian alphabet shows the process twice over, once here among the vowels and once at the end of the alphabet, where ten consonant letters were added for sounds met in Chinese, Tibetan and Sanskrit vocabulary. The core stayed the same size; the edges grew.