Alphabet Letters
Mongolian Za ᠽ
Mongolian Letters
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Origin Adapted from the Old Uyghur alphabet around 1204 CE, at the founding of the Mongol state.
Za writes a voiced sibilant, the sound English spells z, which the native consonant system does not carry as a separate sound. It sits with the other letters the alphabet provides for borrowed vocabulary. Between them these letters let a Mongolian text hold a Tibetan or Sanskrit term recognisably, which mattered a great deal to a literature built on canonical translation. The traditional alphabet is called Hudum, the classical script, to distinguish it from the Todo, Sibe and Manchu writing systems, which are built on the same letters but are not the same alphabet. It was adapted from the Old Uyghur alphabet around 1204, and that alphabet came through Sogdian from Aramaic, so these letters stand at the end of a long chain of borrowing that begins in the Near East.
Facts
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceEncoded at U+183D MONGOLIAN LETTER ZA 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 Attributions
Associated SoundA voiced sibilant, the sound English spells z, which the native consonant system does not carry separately 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 voiced sibilant it writes, z, a sound the native consonant system does not carry separately; the name follows the same phonetic convention as the native letters, provided for borrowed vocabulary. 1 Sense of the Namethe sound z, provided for foreign words 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 PositionThirtieth 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 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 Za: The Voiced Sibilant
Za writes a voiced sibilant, the sound English spells z, and it is the thirtieth letter of the alphabet, one of the ten added for foreign vocabulary. Unicode encodes it at U+183D. The native Mongolian consonant system does not carry a voiced sibilant separately, so this letter, like the others in the added group, was supplied rather than inherited. Its absence from the native system is worth pausing on, because voicing distinctions are otherwise well represented in Mongolian: the stops pair up voiced and voiceless, and so do the affricates. The sibilants do not, and the alphabet reflects the fact by carrying two voiceless sibilants among the inherited letters and no voiced one until the additions.
Chinese and Tibetan vocabulary both bring the sound in, and Russian loanwords brought it in again in the twentieth century, though by then the Cyrillic orthography was carrying most of that traffic in Mongolia itself. In the traditional script the letter remains a marker of borrowed vocabulary, and its shape is an adaptation of the voiceless sibilant it stands beside. In the recited order it stands among the additions, well clear of the two inherited sibilants, which keeps the alphabet honest about which sounds belong to Mongolian and which were supplied for other languages.
Mongolian Za and Voicing in the Mongolian Consonants
Read as a system, the Mongolian consonants are organised around voicing in some places and not in others, and the alphabet records the pattern exactly. The bilabial stops pair, voiced and voiceless. The dental stops pair, though the script does not always distinguish them. The affricates pair. The sibilants do not pair, and the two the language has, plain and palatal, differ in place of articulation rather than in voice. That asymmetry is common enough across languages and it has a consequence for a borrowed alphabet: a script built around it cannot write a voiced sibilant without an addition, and Mongolian eventually made one. The pattern is also uneven in what the writing marks.
Where a distinction exists in the language the script may nonetheless leave it to the reader, as with the dental stops, and where a distinction does not exist the script may still supply a letter, as with the aspirate added for Sanskrit. An alphabet is not a phonemic inventory, and treating it as one leads a reader to conclusions the language does not support. It is a set of decisions about what is worth writing down, taken at different times by people with different needs. The voiced sibilant is a good test of the point, since it is a letter for a sound that was not in the language when the alphabet was borrowed and is in it now, met in a large body of ordinary loanwords as well as in learned vocabulary.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The voiced sibilant beside the voiceless one it is adapted from. Mongolian pairs its stops and its affricates by voice and does not pair its sibilants, so the alphabet carries two voiceless sibilants among the inherited letters and no voiced one until the additions.
Zra stands for a cluster the native alphabet cannot otherwise write, beginning with the sound the added voiced sibilant supplies. A single letter for a cluster is a departure from the alphabetic principle, taken because the sequence could not be built from the letters available.
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