Mongolian Ee ᠧ

Ee is a further vowel letter that stands outside the seven vowels carrying the Mongolian vowel harmony. The seven, from a through the rounded front vowels, form a closed and symmetrical system: a back series, a front series and one neutral vowel. This letter belongs to none of those positions. It is an addition to a system that was already complete, and it is best understood as evidence that the alphabet has continued to be adjusted rather than frozen at the moment of its adoption.

Unicode encodes it at U+1827, immediately after the seventh vowel and before the consonants, which places it at the seam between the inherited core and everything added later. Letters of this kind accumulate in any long lived script. An alphabet is used to write more than the language it was designed for: it writes loanwords, foreign names, dialect forms and the pronunciations of a later century, and each of those pressures can leave a sign behind. The Mongolian alphabet shows the process twice over, once here among the vowels and once at the end of the alphabet, where ten consonant letters were added for sounds met in Chinese, Tibetan and Sanskrit vocabulary. The core stayed the same size; the edges grew.

It is tempting to treat an alphabet as a fixed list, and Mongolian shows why that is a poor assumption. What a chart presents as thirty-five letters in a fixed order is really a core with a history of accretion around it. The core is the inheritance from Old Uyghur: the vowels that carry the harmony and the consonants of the native sound system, which is what was needed to write thirteenth century Mongolian and what the script was borrowed for. Around that core sit letters added for other purposes, and they are not all of the same kind. Some extend the vowels. Ten at the end of the alphabet supply consonants for words taken from other languages.

Beyond the alphabet proper there is a further apparatus of signs, encoded in Unicode under the name Ali Gali, for writing Sanskrit and Tibetan in full, with the distinctions those languages require and Mongolian does not make. And the same Unicode block holds the letters of Todo, Sibe and Manchu, three separate writing systems built on the same inherited shapes, which are not part of this alphabet at all and should not be counted into it. Knowing where the edges are matters. A count of the letters is only meaningful once you have said which of these layers you are counting.