Mongolian Fa: The First of the Added Letters

Fa writes a labial fricative, the sound English spells f, and it is the twenty-sixth letter of the alphabet and the first of the ten added for sounds the native Mongolian system does not contain. Unicode encodes it at U+1839. Mongolian has no native f, so every word containing this letter arrived from somewhere else, chiefly from Chinese in the case of this particular sound. The letter is therefore not part of the alphabet's description of the Mongolian language; it is part of the alphabet's equipment for writing other languages in Mongolian letters. That is a real distinction and worth holding onto, because a chart of thirty-five letters presented as a flat list invites the assumption that Mongolian has thirty-five sounds, which it does not.

The ten added letters were supplied over time as the need arose rather than designed as a set, and their shapes are adapted from letters already in the alphabet, in keeping with the script's general habit of modifying what it has rather than inventing. The nearest native letter to this one is the voiceless bilabial stop, itself a sound that begins no native Mongolian word. The two together make a small point about how a language absorbs foreign sounds: one is a native sound with a restricted distribution, the other is not native at all, and the alphabet marks the difference by putting the first among the inherited letters and the second among the additions. A reader who knows the order knows which is which without being told.