Mongolian Ta and the Cyrillic Alphabet That Replaced It

In the Mongolian People's Republic the traditional script gave way to a Cyrillic orthography from the 1940s, and for most of the twentieth century Cyrillic was what Mongolians read and wrote. The change is often described in purely political terms, and the politics were real, but the new orthography also answered technical complaints that had been made about the traditional script for a long time. Cyrillic distinguishes what the traditional script leaves ambiguous: the two rounded vowels of each pair get separate letters, the dental stops are separate, the velars are separate, and no dot is optional. It writes the modern spoken language rather than a spelling fixed centuries earlier, so what a reader sees is much closer to what a speaker says. It is written horizontally, which suits a printing and typewriting industry built for horizontal lines, and it could be typeset with equipment already in the country.

What it does not do is give access to the earlier literature, and it severs the written connection with Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script never stopped being used. Mongolia has since made room for the traditional script again in official life, and the two orthographies are now used side by side rather than one replacing the other.