Mongolian

The traditional Mongolian script was born of conquest and adapted for scripture. The standard account places its adoption around 1204, when Genghis Khan defeated the Naiman and took into service the Uyghur scribe Tata-tonga, who taught the Uyghur alphabet to the Mongol court for the writing of decrees. The Uyghur script itself descended from Sogdian and ultimately from Aramaic, and the Mongols inherited its most distinctive habit turned through ninety degrees: the script runs in vertical columns from top to bottom, the columns proceeding left to right, a direction no other major living script uses.

Letters take initial, medial and final forms, and the early orthography fit Mongolian only roughly, which later reformers addressed with added diacritics and refined letterforms. The script wrote the chancery documents of the largest land empire in history, and the Secret History of the Mongols, though preserved in Chinese transcription, was composed in this written tradition. Kublai Khan commissioned the square Phags-pa script to replace it, but the vertical letters outlived the experiment and remained the Mongols' own writing, carried by the Oirat in a refined clear script offshoot and by the Manchus, who adapted it for their own imperial language.

From the sixteenth century the Mongolian script became above all a Buddhist instrument. After Altan Khan's meeting with the third Dalai Lama in 1578 sealed the Mongol embrace of Tibetan Buddhism, translation became a national religious project: teams of scholars rendered the Kangyur into Mongolian in the seventeenth century, and the Tengyur followed in the eighteenth under Qing patronage, hundreds of volumes cut to woodblocks in the vertical letters. Monastic printeries produced sutras, prayer books, and the popular literature of Buddhist edification, and the script absorbed a layer of galik letters devised to write Sanskrit and Tibetan mantras exactly, so that the seed syllables of tantric practice could stand correctly on a Mongolian page. Prayer flags, temple inscriptions and amulets used the script alongside Tibetan.

In the twentieth century the Mongolian People's Republic replaced it with Cyrillic and suppressed the monasteries, but Inner Mongolia kept the vertical script in daily use, and since the 1990s Mongolia has restored its teaching and plans its renewed official use, a revival in which reprinted sutras and newly carved temple inscriptions play a visible part. For Mongolian Buddhists the old letters carry the memory of the canon their ancestors translated, and writing them well remains a respected devotional craft.