Mongolian Ta ᠲ

Ta writes the voiceless dental stop and is the eighteenth letter of the alphabet. It is listed as its own letter, recited as its own letter and encoded at U+1832 as its own character, and yet the script does not consistently separate it from the voiced dental stop that follows it in the order. In many positions the two are written the same way, and the reader decides which is meant from the word. This is the same arrangement as the rounded vowels and the velars, and it has the same cause: an alphabet inherited from a language that did not need the distinction, adapted to one that does, without the shapes being multiplied to match.

The single sign for both dental stops goes back through Old Uyghur and Sogdian to a single Aramaic letter, and Mongolian never split it. The practical effect is felt most in proper names and in loanwords, where a reader has no stored form to consult. In native vocabulary the ambiguity is mild, since the harmony class and the shape of the word narrow the field quickly. Charts of the alphabet print the two letters adjacently and often show them together, which is honest about what the script actually distinguishes and what it leaves to the reader. Teaching materials introduce the two dental stops as a pair for the same reason they introduce the two velars as a pair, since learning either singly gives a learner an isolated fact where the pair gives a pattern.

In the Mongolian People's Republic the traditional script gave way to a Cyrillic orthography from the 1940s, and for most of the twentieth century Cyrillic was what Mongolians read and wrote. The change is often described in purely political terms, and the politics were real, but the new orthography also answered technical complaints that had been made about the traditional script for a long time. Cyrillic distinguishes what the traditional script leaves ambiguous: the two rounded vowels of each pair get separate letters, the dental stops are separate, the velars are separate, and no dot is optional. It writes the modern spoken language rather than a spelling fixed centuries earlier, so what a reader sees is much closer to what a speaker says. It is written horizontally, which suits a printing and typewriting industry built for horizontal lines, and it could be typeset with equipment already in the country.

What it does not do is give access to the earlier literature, and it severs the written connection with Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script never stopped being used. Mongolia has since made room for the traditional script again in official life, and the two orthographies are now used side by side rather than one replacing the other.