Mongolian Zhi: A Letter for a Chinese Syllable

Zhi is the thirty-fourth letter of the alphabet and stands for a syllable met in words taken from Chinese, for which the alphabet carries a transcription letter rather than a combination of its own signs. Unicode encodes it at U+1841. A letter that writes a syllable is not an alphabetic device at all, and its presence at the end of the Mongolian alphabet marks the point at which the alphabetic principle was set aside for a particular practical purpose. The Chinese syllable in question has no comfortable spelling in Mongolian letters, since its initial consonant and its vowel both fall outside what the script was built to write, and combining approximations would have produced a form no reader could recognise as the original.

A single agreed sign was the more useful answer. The letter that follows it does the same job for another Chinese syllable, and the two close the alphabet together. They are the last additions in the recited order and the furthest from the inherited core, which is exactly where a device of this kind belongs. Neither letter is common, since each serves one syllable of one foreign language, and both belong to the layer of the alphabet that describes Mongolian's neighbours rather than Mongolian itself.