Mongolian Ue: The Fourth Rounded Vowel

Ue is the transliteration used here for the rounded front vowel written u with an umlaut in scholarly transcription, and it is the seventh letter of the traditional alphabet. It belongs to the front class and completes the set of four rounded vowels: two back, two front, written with two shapes between them. Its shape is identical to that of the rounded front vowel written o with an umlaut, and the two are separated only by the word. Unicode encodes it at U+1826. With this letter the alphabet's native vowel inventory is complete at seven, and the consonants begin. Seven is the number to remember, because the letter that follows the consonants in the recited order, the further vowel written ee, stands outside the seven and outside the harmony system they belong to.

The four rounded vowels are also the point at which transliteration systems for Mongolian diverge most from one another. Some use o and u with umlauts, some use the letters with other diacritics, some spell them out as oe and ue, and some use entirely different conventions inherited from Russian or German scholarship. A reader comparing two books on the same subject should expect the same Mongolian word to look different in each, and should expect the difference to fall on exactly these vowels.