Mongolian Za: The Voiced Sibilant

Za writes a voiced sibilant, the sound English spells z, and it is the thirtieth letter of the alphabet, one of the ten added for foreign vocabulary. Unicode encodes it at U+183D. The native Mongolian consonant system does not carry a voiced sibilant separately, so this letter, like the others in the added group, was supplied rather than inherited. Its absence from the native system is worth pausing on, because voicing distinctions are otherwise well represented in Mongolian: the stops pair up voiced and voiceless, and so do the affricates. The sibilants do not, and the alphabet reflects the fact by carrying two voiceless sibilants among the inherited letters and no voiced one until the additions.

Chinese and Tibetan vocabulary both bring the sound in, and Russian loanwords brought it in again in the twentieth century, though by then the Cyrillic orthography was carrying most of that traffic in Mongolia itself. In the traditional script the letter remains a marker of borrowed vocabulary, and its shape is an adaptation of the voiceless sibilant it stands beside. In the recited order it stands among the additions, well clear of the two inherited sibilants, which keeps the alphabet honest about which sounds belong to Mongolian and which were supplied for other languages.