Mongolian Ga: The Voiced Velar and Its Dots

Ga writes the voiced velar stop and is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Its written shape is closely bound to that of the back class velar before it, and the two are separated by dots. In practice this means the difference between them can be absent from the page, since dots in this script are dropped freely in ordinary handwriting and are not always supplied in print.

Unicode encodes ga at U+182D. Like the other velars, it participates in the vowel harmony, taking one pronunciation in back class words and another in front class words, so a single written letter covers a range of realisations that a phonetic transcription would have to separate. Alphabet charts usually present the velars as a small group and teach them together for exactly this reason, since learning them singly gives a learner three unrelated facts where the group gives one pattern. The letter is common, occurring in native vocabulary throughout, and its various medial forms are among the shapes a reader has to become fluent with early. Its relationship to the back class velar is the clearest example in the alphabet of a distinction that the script marks in principle and often declines to mark in practice.