Mongolian La ᠯ

La writes the lateral liquid, the sound spelled l in English, and it is the fifteenth letter of the alphabet. Like the bilabial nasal before it, it is a plainly written native consonant with no harmony alternation and no shared shape to resolve, which makes it one of the anchors a learner can rely on while working out the more ambiguous letters around it.

Unicode encodes it at U+182F. The lateral is also the letter most often held up as an example of Mongolian calligraphy, because its long descending stroke gives a calligrapher the kind of extended line that shows the control of the brush. Traditional Mongolian calligraphy is a living art with its own vocabulary of stroke names, and because the script is written down a continuous spine, a calligraphic word is a single sustained gesture rather than an assembly of separate marks.

The comparison usually drawn is with Arabic rather than with Chinese: both are cursive alphabets in which the joining is the point, both developed elaborate hands for religious and chancery use, and in both the aesthetic problem is how to distribute weight along a line that never lifts. The Mongolian solution runs downward instead of across, which changes the balance of the page entirely.

Calligraphy in the traditional Mongolian script has been practised continuously since the script's adoption, and it developed in the same settings as the literature it served: chanceries, monasteries and the copying of religious books. The vertical spine is what gives the tradition its character. A column of Mongolian is judged first on the straightness and evenness of that spine, and then on how the strokes hang off it, so the discipline is close to the discipline of ruling a line and different from that of a script composed of separate characters.

Seal script, ornamental hands and monumental forms all exist, and the folded ornamental style used on official seals is the best known of them outside Mongolia because it appears on documents that reached other courts. The art was disrupted in the twentieth century in the Mongolian People's Republic when Cyrillic replaced the traditional script in general use from the 1940s, and it continued without that break in Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script has remained in everyday use. Mongolia has since made room for the script again in official life, and calligraphy has been one of the routes by which it came back, taught and exhibited as an art before it was restored to ordinary business.