Mongolian Sha and Writing Sanskrit in Mongolian Letters

Transcribing Sanskrit into a script that was not designed for it is an old problem with a standard shape, and the Mongolian solution belongs to a family of solutions found across Buddhist Asia. Tibetan built a script from an Indian model and could represent Sanskrit almost directly. Chinese, with no alphabet at all, transcribed Sanskrit syllable by syllable using characters chosen for their sound and accepted heavy losses. Mongolian sat between the two, holding an alphabet that could represent most consonants and vowels but could not mark the aspirated and retroflex series that Indian phonology turns on, nor keep three sibilants apart, nor write the clusters Sanskrit permits.

The response was to extend the alphabet with additional signs rather than to abandon it, producing a transcription system capable of writing Sanskrit and Tibetan in full while remaining recognisably the same script. The signs are encoded in Unicode under the name Ali Gali, separately from the thirty-five letters of the alphabet proper, which is the right arrangement: they are an apparatus for writing other languages, not letters of the Mongolian alphabet, and counting them into it would misstate what the alphabet is.