Mongolian Ma ᠮ

Ma writes the bilabial nasal, the sound spelled m in English, and it is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet. It is one of the least complicated letters in the script: the sound is common, native and stable, the letter is distinctly written and not confusable with its neighbours, and it carries no harmony alternation.

Unicode encodes it at U+182E. Its interest is as a clean example of the three positional forms, which every letter here has and which are easiest to see in a letter whose shape is otherwise unambiguous. At the start of a word the letter is drawn with an approach from the head of the column; inside a word it attaches to the spine above and continues it below; at the end of a word it is finished with a form that closes the spine and does not continue. Those three are one letter in three positions, not three letters, and alphabet charts print all three side by side to make the point. A learner who has understood this letter has understood the general mechanism, which is why teaching materials tend to introduce the positional forms with the plainly shaped consonants before turning to the shapes that are shared between letters. The sound itself is native and unrestricted, occurring at the start of words, inside them and at their ends, so unlike the velar nasal or the trill this letter puts no constraint on where it may stand and gives a reader no diagnostic information about a word's origin.

The positional forms of the traditional Mongolian letters are not decoration and not handwriting variants. They are obligatory, and they are part of what the letter is. A letter written in its final form in the middle of a word is not a stylistic choice; it is an error, in the same way that writing a capital in the middle of an English word is an error.

Scripts that behave this way include Arabic and Syriac, and Mongolian inherited the habit along with the alphabet, though it applies the principle in a vertical column rather than a horizontal line. The consequence for digital text is considerable. A stored Mongolian character does not by itself say which form should be drawn, so the software has to work it out from the neighbours, and where the tradition allows more than one shape in the same position the text needs an explicit selector to say which. That is why rendering this script correctly on a screen took much longer than encoding it did, and why for years perfectly valid Mongolian text displayed as a column of disconnected shapes on most systems. The letters were present and the joining was not, which is roughly the difference between a word and a pile of strokes. The problem is now largely solved in current operating systems and fonts, but it shaped a generation of Mongolian computing and it explains why a good deal of material from that period circulates as images rather than as text.