Mongolian Ma and the Three Positions of a Letter

The positional forms of the traditional Mongolian letters are not decoration and not handwriting variants. They are obligatory, and they are part of what the letter is. A letter written in its final form in the middle of a word is not a stylistic choice; it is an error, in the same way that writing a capital in the middle of an English word is an error.

Scripts that behave this way include Arabic and Syriac, and Mongolian inherited the habit along with the alphabet, though it applies the principle in a vertical column rather than a horizontal line. The consequence for digital text is considerable. A stored Mongolian character does not by itself say which form should be drawn, so the software has to work it out from the neighbours, and where the tradition allows more than one shape in the same position the text needs an explicit selector to say which. That is why rendering this script correctly on a screen took much longer than encoding it did, and why for years perfectly valid Mongolian text displayed as a column of disconnected shapes on most systems. The letters were present and the joining was not, which is roughly the difference between a word and a pile of strokes. The problem is now largely solved in current operating systems and fonts, but it shaped a generation of Mongolian computing and it explains why a good deal of material from that period circulates as images rather than as text.