Cyrillic Script

Mongol Script was adopted at the latest by decree of Genghis Khan in 1206 as recorded in The Secret History, and possibly earlier by some scholars’ investigations. According to the linguist Nicholas Poppe, Mongol Script represents a period transitional between Ancient Mongol and Middle Mongol. “It is based upon a dialect of the twelfth or early thirteenth century, a dialect which still retained some Ancient Mongolian features, but otherwise displayed Middle Mongolian forms. Spellings used for Mongol Script represent spellings used in period and has not evolved with the spoken language except to add new words. Only with the adoption of different alphabets in the past century, such as Latin and Cyrillic, were spellings changed to match the modern dialects. Also, some letters in Mongol Script are ambiguous though context and grammatical rules provide distinction. The oldest known copy of The Secret History of the Mongols was written utilizing Chinese characters so names in that text represent phonetic transcription of the local dialect and are at times spelled inconsistently.
The Mongol script has five main vowels and 22 consonants and is written vertically. It can be written quickly and therefore considered similar to shorthand. In many cases, the Mongolian writing system does not correspond with pronunciation. In this respect it is similar to written and spoken English. Because of these complications, Mongols tried to adopt the Square (Pags-pa) script in 1269, the Todu Script in 1648, the Soyombo Script in 1686 and the Cyrillic Script in 1941. The latter, Cyrillic Script was successfully adopted unlike the others, and helped to erase literacy among the population. The Mongolian Cyrillic Alphabet has 35 letters. There have been attempts to revive the old Mongolian Script but so far, there has been little success.

After the revolution of 1921, the Mongolian script was used in Mongolia until 1941. When a new alphabet based on Cyrillic was adopted. In official documents it is stated that the reason for the change from the Mongolian script to the new form of writing was two fold: (I) there was a great gap between the written and spoken languages, and (2) the Mongolian script was not suitable for the assimilation of foreign words. In fact, the second of these reasons is without foundation. The Mongolian script does have a system for transcribing foreign words. From a linguistic point of view the difference between written and spoken languages is unimportant. Such a gap exists in all languages, including, for example, English. Practically all the scripts mentioned above had their own ornamental or decorative form for the press, ex-libraries, book plates and architecture.