Mongolian Fa ᠹ

Fa writes a labial fricative, the sound English spells f, and it is the twenty-sixth letter of the alphabet and the first of the ten added for sounds the native Mongolian system does not contain. Unicode encodes it at U+1839. Mongolian has no native f, so every word containing this letter arrived from somewhere else, chiefly from Chinese in the case of this particular sound. The letter is therefore not part of the alphabet's description of the Mongolian language; it is part of the alphabet's equipment for writing other languages in Mongolian letters. That is a real distinction and worth holding onto, because a chart of thirty-five letters presented as a flat list invites the assumption that Mongolian has thirty-five sounds, which it does not.

The ten added letters were supplied over time as the need arose rather than designed as a set, and their shapes are adapted from letters already in the alphabet, in keeping with the script's general habit of modifying what it has rather than inventing. The nearest native letter to this one is the voiceless bilabial stop, itself a sound that begins no native Mongolian word. The two together make a small point about how a language absorbs foreign sounds: one is a native sound with a restricted distribution, the other is not native at all, and the alphabet marks the difference by putting the first among the inherited letters and the second among the additions. A reader who knows the order knows which is which without being told.

The ten letters at the end of the traditional Mongolian alphabet exist because the script was asked to write words it was not built for. Chinese contributed vocabulary with sounds and syllables Mongolian lacks; Tibetan and Sanskrit contributed the entire technical vocabulary of Buddhism, with distinctions of aspiration and articulation that Mongolian does not make. The response was to extend the alphabet rather than to distort the words, which is the choice that produced these letters: an f, two further velars, an aspirate, a dental affricate, a voiced sibilant, a cluster sign, a letter for the Tibetan voiceless lateral, and two letters for Chinese syllables. Read as a group they are a fairly precise record of which foreign vocabulary mattered enough to be written accurately.

Beyond them lies a further apparatus, encoded in Unicode under the name Ali Gali, for writing Sanskrit and Tibetan in full rather than approximately, which belongs to the same effort at a greater level of ambition. Neither set is a letter of the Mongolian language, and the alphabet is better understood with the seam between the inherited twenty-five and these additions kept clearly in view. Their shapes follow the script's usual habit of adapting what is already present rather than inventing, so most of them are recognisably modifications of inherited letters, which is also why they sit comfortably on the same spine and in the same hand.