Mongolian Transliteration: from a Latin Alphabet to Romanisation of Cyrillic

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Mongolian Transliteration: From a Latin Alphabet to Romanisation of Cyrillic

ALAN SANdeRS

The Mongolian vertical script, the uigarjin or Uighur- based writing introduced under Genghis Khan, according to the Secret History of the Mongols, has been enjoying a modest, second, come- back in Mongolia. Banned from use by the communist authorities after 1945, it returned to popularity with the Mongolian national democratic revolution of 1990, although it is different from spoken Mongolian. For several reasons, including cost and public apathy, the restored enthusiasm for uigarjin soon faded, and it was decided to retain for public use the Mongolian Cyrillic script which had replaced it. The president’s recent promotion of uigarjin for the publication of official documents stimulated renewed interest in its use. However, the promotion of uigarjin coincided with a refocus of attention on the 10- year- old Mongolian plan to romanise the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet, that is, transliterate it into Latin letters in preparation for a gradual move to general use of the Latin script. These script changes were not merely technical; they reflected contemporary political considerations which become clear on fur- ther examination.

FRoM LATiNiSATioN To RoMANiSATioN

After the formation of the USSR in 1922, to build the new communist society Stalin, as Commissar for Nationalities, ordered a drive against illiteracy amongst national minorities. A conference held in 1926 in Baku, Azerbaijan, created a Latin alphabet for the use of all T urkic- speaking inhabitants of the USSR, replacing their traditional Arabic script and cutting them off from their cultural and islamic roots. Following this example, Soviet and Mongolian specialists set about developing a Latin alphabet suitable for use by the Khalkhas in the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) as well as the Buryats and Kalmyks living in Soviet Russia, similarly replacing their traditional uigarjin script and cutting them off from their cultural and Buddhist past. (The Buddhist T urkic- speaking Tuvans were literate in uigarjin.) From 1932 government offices and businesses in Mongolia were ordered to display signs, keep records and use stamps and seals in the new script, but official approval for general use came only in February 1941. However, on 9 May 1941 the MPR party and government decreed that

‘Mongolia’s new script based on the Russian script’ was to be introduced instead, ‘to consolidate fraternal ties with the Soviet people’ (see Table 1/1). The sudden change for Turks and Mongols from Latin to Cyrillic was timely for unity with the Russian people as their ‘great patriotic war’ began. on 18 May 1945, the MPR party and government decreed that the press and all state business was to be in the ‘new script’ and the Latin script was abandoned. What was the 1932 Mongolian Latin script like? As reproduced in Poppe’s Mongol kele biçig suralcakada yzeke debter [Mongolian Language Textbook], published in Leningrad in 1932, the new 26-letter Latin alphabet had four accented letters: ç, ө, ş and ƶ, representing ch, ö, sh and dzh; j for ‘German’ and k = x, that is, kh (see Table 1/2). even with transliteration into Latin script, this was still a textbook of Mongolian in uigarjin orthography. For his first prakticheskiy uchebnik [practical textbook] of Mongolian (Khalkha), published in Leningrad in 1931, Nicholas Poppe had devised his own phonetic transcription of uigarjin into Cyrillic using additional accents and symbols: dotted letters such as overdot o (ȯ) for vowels and double-accented letters like ǟ for long vowels, breves for the reduced vowel ă etc., ӊ for ng and the symbol џ for dj. The full introduction of Mongolian Cyrillic in 1945 raised the question of how to represent different sounds in the same script. in Russian textbooks of Mongolian like A.R. Rinchine’s Uchebnik mongol’skogo yazyka (1952) the Cyrillic alphabet conveys the letters (but not the sounds) of Mongolian and there- fore marks ө and ү as ö and ü, ö being ‘German’, and transliterates ж and з as дж and дз. An english adaptation of Rinchine, produced for the National Security Agency by Norman Wild and Stuart H. Buck in 1956, was used by British diplo- mats after the establishment of diplomatic relations with Mongolia in 1963. The PCGN/BGN system for romanising Mongolian Cyrillic was adopted jointly in 1964 by the UK Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British official Use and the US Board on Geographic Names. This romanisation (see Table 2/2), which includes з = dz, x = h, ы = ï and ь = ĭ, is widely used by geographers for map-making but now seems rather old-fashioned, since it no longer matches the current practice of Mongolian map-makers. The BGN publication Romanization Systems and Roman-Script Spelling Conventions was superseded by Romanization Systems and Policies published by the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency at Springfield, Virginia, where the BGN is based.1 According to the United Nations Working Group on Romanisation Systems, as of 2003 no romanisation system for Mongolian Cyrillic had been approved at the UN conferences on the standardisation of geographical names as no informa- tion had been received as to whether any national systems of romanisation existed. However, since 2003 the Mongolians have launched their own romanisation standard (see below). The Library of Congress, the research library of the US Congress, de facto the national library of the USA, offers a separate romanisation table for the Mongol classical script but stores Mongolian Cyrillic under the heading Non-Slavic