Mongolian Ma: The Bilabial Nasal

Ma writes the bilabial nasal, the sound spelled m in English, and it is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet. It is one of the least complicated letters in the script: the sound is common, native and stable, the letter is distinctly written and not confusable with its neighbours, and it carries no harmony alternation.

Unicode encodes it at U+182E. Its interest is as a clean example of the three positional forms, which every letter here has and which are easiest to see in a letter whose shape is otherwise unambiguous. At the start of a word the letter is drawn with an approach from the head of the column; inside a word it attaches to the spine above and continues it below; at the end of a word it is finished with a form that closes the spine and does not continue. Those three are one letter in three positions, not three letters, and alphabet charts print all three side by side to make the point. A learner who has understood this letter has understood the general mechanism, which is why teaching materials tend to introduce the positional forms with the plainly shaped consonants before turning to the shapes that are shared between letters. The sound itself is native and unrestricted, occurring at the start of words, inside them and at their ends, so unlike the velar nasal or the trill this letter puts no constraint on where it may stand and gives a reader no diagnostic information about a word's origin.