Mongolian I and the Letters a Reader Must Disambiguate

Traditional Mongolian writing asks more of its reader than most alphabets do. Several distinct letters share a written shape, and the reader resolves them from the word rather than from the page. The vowel i is one of the shapes involved, since a tooth followed by a stroke can be read more than one way in a run of similar strokes. The rounded vowels are written with one shape for two sounds. The two dental stops are not consistently kept apart. The nasal is distinguished from a vowel by a dot that ordinary handwriting often omits. None of this is carelessness, and it is worth saying so plainly, because a script that looks underspecified to an outsider is usually well specified for the language it serves.

A fluent reader of Mongolian is not decoding letter by letter; the vocabulary is finite, the harmony narrows the possibilities sharply, and the word is recognised as a whole. The cost falls on other readers: on learners, on scholars reading unfamiliar names, and on machines. It is one of the reasons the Mongolian People's Republic adopted a Cyrillic orthography in the twentieth century, and one of the reasons digital text in the traditional script has needed a good deal of engineering to render correctly. The ambiguity is a genuine property of the writing system, not a fault in any particular copy of it.