Mongolian Da ᠳ

Da writes the voiced dental stop and is the nineteenth letter of the alphabet, standing immediately after its voiceless partner and sharing its written treatment with it. The script does not consistently separate the two, so a reader identifies which is meant from the word rather than from the page. Unicode encodes da at U+1833, giving it a character of its own even where a manuscript gives it no shape of its own, which is the standard arrangement for this script: the encoding records the letters of the alphabet, and the rendering records the shapes, and the two do not correspond one to one. That mismatch is the single hardest thing about handling traditional Mongolian in software.

A correct digital text distinguishes letters that a correct handwritten text does not, so converting a scanned manuscript into encoded text requires reading it, not merely recognising shapes, and converting encoded text into a faithful image of a manuscript hand requires knowing which distinctions to discard. Neither direction is mechanical. The dental stops are a good place to see the problem in miniature, because they are common, they are genuinely distinct in the language, and the page frequently declines to say which one is present.

While the Mongolian People's Republic moved to Cyrillic in the twentieth century, the traditional script continued in ordinary daily use across the border in Inner Mongolia, where it remains the standard written form of Mongolian. That continuity matters for the script's survival and for its present character. Publishing, schooling, newspapers, signage and administration have gone on in the traditional script without a break, so the practical work of adapting it to typewriters, typesetting, computers and the internet was done by a community that needed it to work rather than by antiquarians reviving it.

Much of the font development, the input method design and the standardisation effort behind Mongolian in Unicode came from that side of the border. The two written traditions have diverged somewhat, as separated written traditions do, with different vocabularies for modern things and different conventions in spelling and layout. When Mongolia turned back toward the traditional script in recent decades, it turned toward something that had gone on being used rather than toward a reconstruction, which is a considerable practical advantage and a rare one. Scripts that fall out of use are usually revived from books; this one was still in the hands of the people writing it.