3.8.3.1. Mongolian Writing: Uighur
Description
This article is from the Mongolia FAQ, by Oliver Corff with numerous contributions by others.
3.8.3.1. Mongolian Writing: Uighur
The traditional Mongolian script is written in vertical lines from
left to right, very much like an Arab page turned counter-clockwise by
90 degrees. Though this script (called Uighur script because the
Uighurs had used it first) has been the main vehicle of written
Mongolian, a number of other writing systems have been and are being
employed. The earliest documents still existing date back to the 13th
century.
Despite numerous other attempts to introduce different types of
writing, this script has proven to be to most stable vehicle of
written Mongolian. It was used up to the 1930s in Mongolia when it was
first replaced with a short-lived Latin script (until 1938) and then
replaced by a modified Cyrillic script in 1940.
In Southern Mongolia or China's Inner Mongolia (Inner Mongol
Autonomous Region, or Öwörr Mongol Öörtöö Zasax Oron) Uighur or
Classical Mongolian writing is still the official writing system.
Similar to the historical orthography of English, Classical Mongolian
as it is used today contains a lot of phonological archaisms and
historical features which make it sometimes not perfectly easy to
learn but which offer valuable insight for linguists and provide
enough of dialect neutrality for modern-day speakers from most
Mongolian language areas.
In the beginning of the 1990s, Mongolia was considering the return to
the Classical script despite the heavy financial and social cost: New
schoolbooks had to be compiled and many adults who were born after
1940 must now learn a completely different writing system which does
not only look different but which also represents a different
historical development stage of the Mongolian language. In 1992, A
law was passed to the effect that from 1994 on Mongolian Classical
script be the official writing of Mongolia again. Even the new
constitution of Mongolia passed in 1992 was printed in Modern
(Cyrillic) and Classical (Uighur) Mongolian (see the Constitution in
Modern Mongolian, MLS-encoded and Constitution in Classical Mongolian,
MLS-encoded, both in Infosystem Mongolei) but one year after this
magic date nothing really changed substantially.
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