Mongolian Ra and What a Script Reveals About Its Language

An alphabet is a theory of a language, and reading it as one is instructive. The Mongolian alphabet says that this language has seven vowels sorted into two harmony classes with one neutral member; that its velars alternate with the class of the word; that it does not begin words with a trill, a velar nasal or a voiceless bilabial stop; that the difference between the members of certain consonant pairs is recoverable from context; and that it needs no letters at all for a set of sounds common in the languages around it. Every one of those statements is a claim about Mongolian, and the script commits to all of them. Where a claim turned out to be inadequate the alphabet was extended rather than rebuilt, which is why ten letters for foreign sounds sit at its end and a further apparatus for Sanskrit and Tibetan sits beyond that.

The clean way to read a borrowed script is therefore in two layers: what the source alphabet supplied, and what the borrowing language had to add. In Mongolian both layers are visible in the recited order itself, the inherited core first and the additions after it, so the alphabet is its own history lesson if you know where the seam falls. The reading has limits worth stating. A script records the sound system its users believed they had, at the moment the spelling was fixed, and traditional Mongolian spelling was fixed centuries before the modern spoken language, so the theory the alphabet states is a historical one rather than a current one.