Alphabet Letters
Mongolian Ang ᠩ
Mongolian Letters
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Origin Adapted from the Old Uyghur alphabet around 1204 CE, at the founding of the Mongol state.
Ang writes the velar nasal, the sound English spells ng in sing, made at the soft palate with the air passing through the nose. It does not begin a Mongolian word, so it is met only inside a word and at the end of one, and the alphabet places it directly after Na, grouping the two nasals together at the head of the consonants before the stops begin. Much ordinary writing leaves out the dots that separate certain letters, so a practised reader supplies them from the word, and the script depends on knowing the language rather than on decoding the signs. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the script carried a large Buddhist literature in Mongolian, the translation of the Kangyur among it, and it carries religious writing still.
Facts
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceEncoded at U+1829 MONGOLIAN LETTER ANG in the Mongolian block. 2Tradition: The Mongolian script Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe traditional alphabet, called Hudum, is one of several writing systems built on the same letters. Todo, Sibe and Manchu extend it and are encoded in the same Unicode block, but they are separate systems and are not part of this alphabet. 2Tradition: The Mongolian script Meaning in the Attesting SourceVowel harmony sorts the vowels into a back set and a front set, with i neutral to both. A word normally draws its vowels from one set, and the class of the word governs the shape some consonants take. 1Tradition: The Mongolian script Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet written in vertical columns running top to bottom, with the columns ordered left to right, a direction unique among national scripts in current use. 1Tradition: The Mongolian script PositionTenth of the thirty-five letters of the traditional Mongolian alphabet, in the order the script is recited and encoded 2Tradition: The Mongolian script How the Letter JoinsCursive: the letters join along a continuous vertical spine, and each takes a different shape at the start of a word, inside it and at its end. Those three are positions of one letter, not separate letters. 1Tradition: The Mongolian script Attributions
Associated SoundThe velar nasal, the sound English spells ng in sing; it does not begin a Mongolian word 1Tradition: Mongolian phonology Origins
Origin PeriodAdapted from the Old Uyghur alphabet around 1204 CE, at the founding of the Mongol state. 1Tradition: The Mongolian script Place of OriginThe Mongol steppe, from an Old Uyghur alphabet that reached it through Sogdian from Aramaic. 1Tradition: The Mongolian script Origin of the NameNamed for the velar nasal it writes, the sound of ng in sing, following the script's phonetic naming convention rather than an inherited word. 1 Sense of the Namethe ng of sing, a velar nasal 1Tradition: The Mongolian script Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleFrom the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the script carried a large Buddhist literature in Mongolian, including the translation of the Kangyur, and it carries religious writing still. 3Tradition: Mongolian Buddhism Learn More
Mongolian Ang: The Nasal That Cannot Begin a Word
Ang writes the velar nasal, the sound English spells ng at the end of sing, and it is the ninth letter of the alphabet. Its defining property is a restriction rather than a shape: no Mongolian word begins with it. The sound occurs freely inside words and at their ends, and never at their start, which is a constraint Mongolian shares with English and with a great many other languages. That has a consequence for the alphabet. Every other letter here has three positional forms, initial, medial and final, because every other letter can stand in all three places. A letter that cannot begin a word has an initial form only in the sense that a chart may print one for completeness.
Unicode encodes ang at U+1829. In transliteration it is usually written ng, which invites a reader to think of it as two sounds, and it is not: it is one nasal made at the same place in the mouth as the velar stops, and the alphabet treats it as one letter accordingly. The letter is a useful reminder that an alphabet records the sound system of a particular language, including that language's rules about which sounds may stand where, and that those rules are as much a part of the writing system as the shapes are.
Mongolian Ang and the Shape of the Native Word
An alphabet quietly records the shape of the words it was built for. Mongolian permits no word to begin with the velar nasal, none to begin with r, and none to begin with the voiceless bilabial stop, and each of those restrictions leaves a trace in how the script is used. A word beginning with one of them is a borrowing, and a reader can tell as much before knowing what the word means. That makes the letters at these positions useful diagnostics: an initial r or p in a Mongolian text is a flag that the word arrived from Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese, Russian or elsewhere. Restrictions of this kind are called phonotactic, and they differ sharply between languages.
English forbids an initial velar nasal too, which is why English speakers find the sound easy at the end of a word and hard at the start of one, while many languages of Southeast Asia and Africa allow it without difficulty. When a script is borrowed across such a boundary the fit is never exact, and the gaps show up in exactly this way. The traditional Mongolian alphabet was extended at its end with ten letters for sounds met in foreign vocabulary, which is the same problem solved from the other direction: not what the language forbids at the start of a word, but what it does not contain at all.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The alphabet's two nasals outside the labial one. The dental nasal stands anywhere in a word; the velar nasal never begins one, so a chart printing an initial form for it is filling out a table rather than recording a shape anyone writes.
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