Mongolian Na: The Dental Nasal and Its Missing Dot

Na writes the dental nasal, the sound spelled n in English, and it is the first consonant of the alphabet. Its written form is the same plain tooth that serves for the open vowels, and the alphabet's device for telling them apart is a single dot placed to the left of the tooth when the letter stands before a vowel. In ordinary writing that dot is frequently omitted, which means the most common consonant in the language is regularly written with a shape that could equally be a vowel. As with the rounded vowels, the reader resolves it from the word. The dot is not decorative and is not optional in principle; careful manuscript hands and printed editions use it, and it appears in the modern digital encoding as part of the letter rather than as a separate mark. It simply belongs to a class of distinctions that fluent writing lets slide.

Unicode encodes na at U+1828, at the head of the consonants and immediately after the vowels. Anyone learning to read the script encounters this letter early and encounters with it the general lesson that a Mongolian tooth on the spine is a question rather than an answer, to be settled by counting the strokes, by the position in the word, and by recognising the word itself.