Mongolian Sa and the Script That Carried the Kangyur

From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the traditional Mongolian script carried a very large Buddhist literature in the Mongolian language. The central undertaking was the translation of the Kangyur, the canonical collection of discourses attributed to the Buddha, which had already been assembled in Tibetan and was rendered into Mongolian in a project of the kind that only a court could organise or pay for. A translation on that scale is also a decision about a script, because it fixes conventions for hundreds of thousands of foreign words and settles how a proper name from Sanskrit is to be written in Mongolian letters. Much of the transcription apparatus that sits at the end and the edges of the alphabet exists because of this literature and would have had no purpose without it.

The consequences outlasted the project. Monastic education in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia was conducted in this script and in this vocabulary; the printed and manuscript books of that tradition are still the largest body of text the script has ever carried; and religious writing in the traditional script continues today. When people argue about restoring the script to general use, one of the arguments made for it is precisely that this literature is otherwise reachable only in translation or transcription.