Mongolian Ta: The Dental Stop the Script Does Not Fully Separate

Ta writes the voiceless dental stop and is the eighteenth letter of the alphabet. It is listed as its own letter, recited as its own letter and encoded at U+1832 as its own character, and yet the script does not consistently separate it from the voiced dental stop that follows it in the order. In many positions the two are written the same way, and the reader decides which is meant from the word. This is the same arrangement as the rounded vowels and the velars, and it has the same cause: an alphabet inherited from a language that did not need the distinction, adapted to one that does, without the shapes being multiplied to match.

The single sign for both dental stops goes back through Old Uyghur and Sogdian to a single Aramaic letter, and Mongolian never split it. The practical effect is felt most in proper names and in loanwords, where a reader has no stored form to consult. In native vocabulary the ambiguity is mild, since the harmony class and the shape of the word narrow the field quickly. Charts of the alphabet print the two letters adjacently and often show them together, which is honest about what the script actually distinguishes and what it leaves to the reader. Teaching materials introduce the two dental stops as a pair for the same reason they introduce the two velars as a pair, since learning either singly gives a learner an isolated fact where the pair gives a pattern.