The Mongolian language historically has four writing systems that have been used over the centuries. Mongolian (Монгол), is the best-known member of the Mongolian language family, and the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia. ...

Chinese-based

Two writing systems based on simplified Chinese ideograms and Sinogram-typed alphabetic block (see Hangul), respectively, were used to write the Mongolic language of Khitan, and also to write the Tungusic Jurchen language in their modified forms. These two systems, called "Khitan/Jurchen big characters" and "Khitan/Jurchen small characters" fell into disuse when North China reverted to a homogenous Han Chinese culture. A Chinese character. ... Hangul (한글) is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language, as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China. ... The Khitan, in Chinese Qidan (契丹 Pinyin: Qìdān), were an ethnic group which dominated much of Manchuria and was classified in Chinese history as one of the Tungus ethnic groups (東胡族 dōng hú zú). ... The Jurchens (Chinese: 女真, pinyin: nǚzhēn) were a Tungusic people who inhabited parts of Manchuria and northern Korea until the seventeenth century, when they became the Manchus. ... Han Chinese (Simplified Chinese: 汉族; Traditional Chinese: 漢族; pinyin: ) is a term which refers to the majority ethnic group within China and the largest single human ethnic group in the world. ...

Phagspa

During the Yuan Dynasty, the Kublai Khan asked Phagspa to design a new writing system to be used by the whole empire. Phagspa in turn modified the traditional Tibetan script and gave birth to a new set of characters called Phagspa characters. These characters did not receive wide acceptance and fell into disuse with the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368. After this it became mainly a way for Mongolians to learn Chinese characters instead. Some scholars believe that it had been the source of the Hangul alphabet. The Yuan Dynasty (Mongolian: Dai Ön Yeke Mongghul Ulus; Chinese: 元朝 or 大元帝國) lasting officially from 1271 to 1368, also called the Mongol Dynasty, was the name given to the significant ruling family of Borjigin in Asia. ... Kublai Khan or Khubilai Khan (1215 – 1294), Mongol military leader, was Khan (1260-1294) of the Mongol Empire and founder and first Emperor (1279-1294) of the Chinese Yuan Dynasty. ... The Mongolian language historically has four writing systems that have been used over the centuries. ... A writing system, also called a script, is a type of symbolic communication system used to represent elements or statements expressible in some spoken language, for the purpose of communication. ... Om Mani Padme Hum, the primary mantra of Tibetan Buddhism written in the Tibetan script, on a rock outside the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. ... Hangul (한글) is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language, as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China. ...

For the purpose of encoding in digital media, Phagspa characters are allocated a block of 56 characters from U+A840 to U+A87F, and they will be available in Unicode 5.0, scheduled to be published sometime in 2006. In computing, Unicode provides an international standard which has the goal of providing the means to encode the text of every document people want to store on computers. ...

Mongolian script proper

Intermediate between these is the Mongolian script proper, which was derived in the 12th-13th centuries from the Uyghur alphabet, a descendant of Sogdian alphabet that came from Syriac alphabet. It is used in Inner Mongolia to this day. Perhaps its two most notable features are that it is a vertical script, and that it is the only such script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) In fact, the Uighurs changed the orientation of their script from horizontal to vertical to emulate the Chinese writing system. The visual effect is that of Syriac rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. This alphabet fails to distinguish several vowels (o/u, ö/ü, final a/e) and consonants (t/d, k/g, sometimes ž/y). The situation is somewhat comparable to the various dialects of English, which must represent 10 or more vowels with only 5 letters, and uses the digraph th regardless of voicing. However, two regional variants of the Mongol script use diacritics to represent all phonemic distinctions unambiguously: the western "Clear script" derived c. 1648 for the Oirats and Kalmyks, and still in use today in Jungaria; and its recent offshoot, a northern Buryat script developed in 1905. The Uyghur alphabet is any of the following: A descendant of the Sogdian alphabet, used for texts of Buddhist, Manichæan and Christian contents for 700–800 years in East Turkestan. ... The Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of Aramaic alphabet. ... 11th century book in Syriac Serto. ... Inner Mongolia (Mongolian: ᠥᠪᠦᠷ ᠮᠣᠨᠺᠤᠯᠤᠨ ᠥᠪᠡᠷᠲᠡᠺᠡᠨ ᠵᠠᠰᠠᠬᠤ ᠣᠷᠤᠨ r Mongghul-un bertegen Jasaqu Orun; Chinese: 内蒙古自治区; Hanyu Pinyin: N i Měnggǔ Z qū) is an Autonomous Region of the Peoples Republic of China. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Oyirad (also spelled Oirat) is an alliance of the western Mongols. ... The Republic of Kalmykia ( Russian: Респу́блика Калмы́кия; Kalmyk: Хальм Тангч) is a federal subject of the Russian Federation (a republic). ... Dzungaria (also Junggar, Jungaria, Sungaria, Zungaria) is a physical region, covering approximately 777,000 km², within the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, in northwestern China. ... The Buryats, numbering approximately 350,000, are the largest ethnic minority group in Mongolian descent and share many customs with their Mongolian cousins, including nomadic herding and erecting yurts for shelter. ...

Besides the Mongolian language, the Evenk language is written in the Mongolian script. The Evenk language (Evenki language) (SIL: EVN, ISO 639-2: tut) is the largest of the northern group of the Manchu-Tungus languages, a group which also includes the Even and Negidal languages. ...

Cyrillic

The most recent Mongolian alphabet is a slightly modified Cyrillic script (the Russian alphabet plus 2 additional letters: Өө and Үү). This alphabet is a phonemic alphabet, meaning that there is a high level of consistency in the representation of individual sounds. It was introduced following the communist revolution in Mongolia, but is currently being phased out again in favor of the Mongolian alphabet proper, described above. The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (i. ...

See also

• Languages of China

For treatment of the various forms of spoken Chinese, see Chinese spoken languages. ...

External links

• Mongolian Alphabet on Omniglot
• Phagspa Alphabet on Omniglot
• SCA: Mongol Scripts
• Mongolian Alphabet on Lingua Mongolia
• GB18030 Support Package for Windows 2000/XP, including Chinese, Tibetan, Yi, Mongolian and Thai font by Microsoft