Mongolian Haa: The Last of the Sound Letters

Haa writes a glottal or velar fricative and is the thirty-first letter of the alphabet. It is the last of the added letters that stands for a single sound, since the four that follow it serve clusters and syllables rather than individual consonants. Unicode encodes it at U+183E. The sound is met in words taken from other languages, chiefly Tibetan and Chinese, and is not part of the native Mongolian consonant system. Its position in the alphabet is where the additions begin to change character: up to this point the added letters supply consonants, and after it they supply larger units, which is a sign that the tradition had exhausted what could be done letter by letter and had begun to solve particular transcription problems one at a time. That progression is legible in the order itself, and it is one of the reasons the recited alphabet is worth reading as a sequence rather than as a set.

A chart that sorts the letters alphabetically by their romanisation loses it entirely, along with the seam between the inherited twenty-five and everything that follows them. As with the rest of the added group, the sound is absent from native Mongolian vocabulary, so the letter is by itself a reliable indication that a word came from somewhere else.