Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 18 – Mongols live
in three states, Mongolia, Buryatia within the borders of the Russian
Federation, and Inner Mongolia within the borders of the Peoples Republic of
China. They share many things in common including their language, but they are
divided by alphabets imposed by outsiders.
The Buryats are currently compelled to
use a Cyrillic alphabet as a result of a 2002 Russian law. The people of Inner
Mongolia use the traditional Mongol alphabet which is written vertically. But the
people of Mongolia are caught not only between those two scripts but also
between them and the possible introduction of a Latin-based script as well.
Because alphabets can divide
otherwise common linguistic communities and thus change the pattern of
influence from the outside in a region, the question of alphabet reform in
Mongolia not only reflects changes in the balance between Russia and China but
also the possibility of the growth of a pan-Mongol identity challenging both
Moscow and Beijing.
In an article for the Asia-Russia
Daily portal, Yikiyasu Arai, a correspondent for Japan’s JB Press, explores the
complicated history of alphabets among the Mongols and pointedly asks “will
Mongolia have the courage to scrap the Russian alphabet?” (asiarussia.ru/news/5394/).
The traditional Mongolian script was
introduced in the 12th to the 14th centuries by the
Uyghurs, who drew on Arabic script as their model but wrote it vertically
rather than horizontally. Some explain this by reference to the fact that it
was easier for Mongol horsemen to reach a vertical text, but others say this is
the result of Chinese influence.
This script won out over the block
alphabet from Tibet which was introduced by the Buddhist monk Pagba-Lama in
large measure because the latter was both more complicated to write and did not
have letters for all the sounds in the Mongol language, Yikiyasu Arai says.
The traditional script
lasted until the 1921 revolution and the establishment of communist power in
1924. Under the influence of the Soviet
Union whose leaders believed that Latin script could help “backward” peoples
overcome their illiteracy functional and political faster than any other, Ulan
Bator was pushed into adopting a Latin script.
The Latin script gradually
replaced the traditional one, although the latter was still taught because so
much of Mongolia’s literary heritage was written in it. Then, in 1941, Moscow decided that Mongolia
should go over to a script based on the Russian Cyrillic in order to be more
tightly integrated with the communist world.
(Some activists
in Inner Mongolia pushed for the adoption of the Cyrillic script after the
communists took power in China, but they were suppressed as relations between
Moscow and Beijing worsened in the late 1950s and 1960s.)
With the weakening
and then collapse of the Soviet Union, some in Mongolia began to press for
dropping Cyrillic and going back either to the traditional script or to a
Latin-based one. For many Mongols, the traditional script became a symbol of
their national tradition, and beginning in 1992, Mongol schools began to teach
the first classes in it.
But because Ulan
Bator did not have the funds to pay for new textbooks and because the
traditional script did not allow for the expression of certain scientific
formulas, Mongolian school children after being exposed to the traditional script
in the first two grades have been forced to shift back to the Cyrillic
beginning in grade three.
The alphabet
struggles are likely to continue, Yikiyasu Arai says, because the various
scripts “mark out a definite cultural circle and sometimes a religious sphere
of influence as well. In some cases,” he concludes, “scripts disappear with the
collapse of empires and the destruction of their spheres of influence.”
That is what makes this issue so
important not only in Mongolia but for Mongols in China and Russia and for
those two countries more generally.
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