Mongolian Ga and the Reader Who Supplies What Is Missing

Every writing system leaves something out and expects the reader to supply it. What differs is how much, and Mongolian leaves out a good deal: the difference between two rounded vowels, the difference between two dental stops, and, whenever the dots are omitted, the difference between two velars and between a nasal and a vowel. A page of traditional Mongolian is best understood as a set of strong constraints on what the word can be rather than as a specification of what it is. This works because the constraints are strong. The harmony halves the possibilities at a stroke. The position in the word rules out further candidates. The vocabulary of a language is finite and its frequent words are very frequent. A fluent reader converges on the word almost immediately and does not experience the ambiguity at all.

The situation is not unlike unpointed Hebrew or Arabic, where a script that looks impossibly underdetermined to a learner is read at speed by anyone who knows the language. It is worth saying because the alternative reading, that the script is simply imprecise and its users put up with it, misdescribes both the script and its users. The imprecision is where the language is predictable, and nowhere else.