traditional Mongolian script & the digital era

The traditional Mongolian script, which was officially abandoned in the 1940s in favor of the Cyrillic alphabet, has been making something of a comeback, though the Roman alphabet still seems to be winning the debate in Mongolia over which script should be used there in the future.

The National University of Mongolia and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology have been working with Unesco support to develop “e-tools” for the text processing of traditional Mongolian script. “The universities chose to forego the earliest version of the script in favor of the most ‘recent’ one,” according to a Unesco story. (I hope someone can write a comment elaborating on this.)

One result of this project is a database comprising 55,000 words in traditional Mongolian script and Mongolian Cyrillic.

Four volumes of the “Primary World Orthography Dictionary” are ready for publication. Together with spell check software for the script, the team is now finalizing several digitized types of traditional script and genuine Unicode-compatible open-type fonts.

source: Revival of traditional Mongolian script through e-tools

en Français: Les outils électroniques font renaître l’écriture mongole traditionnelle

This site to convert Mongolian Cyrillic to Mongolian Uighurjin (variant name for the traditional Mongolian script) should prove of interest. (Note: It’s not fully functional yet. But I’m adding the link in the hope that the site will be up and running before long.)

2 thoughts on “traditional Mongolian script & the digital era

  1. I am preparing a travel guide for Mongolia and am not sure which method of romanization to use
    Kharhorin = Harhorin
    Altai Ulgiy = Altai Ulgii
    Is there a reference?

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