Transliterating Mongolian

History books, travel guides, and text messages all spell words differently

In English, Mongolian words may be spelled differently from source to source. This has to do with with transliteration. Standard Khalkha Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet, but English is written in the Roman alphabet, and most English speakers don't know Cyrillic. Transliteration is the process of taking something written in one alphabet and rewriting it in another alphabet. Transliterating into the Roman alphabet is also called Romanization.

Transliteration is usually done according to a system, and in many countries there is one official transliteration system. For example, Pinyin is mandated by the Chinese government for spelling standard Mandarin. In the absence of that, usually a group of professors will hold a conference and make their own system. Sometimes both happen, and you get competing systems. Chinese used to have the Wade-Giles Romanization system, although Pinyin has kind of killed it at this point.

Mongolian doesn't actually have either; there is no "official" way of writing Mongolian words in English. But in my experience there are three major non-official "trends" in the way I see Mongolian words spelled, which I will call "Academic," "Travel Guide," and "Text Message."

To get an idea of the way they look, here is a verse of the Mongolian national anthem written in several different ways:

Cyrillic	Өндөр төрийн минь сүлд ивээж Өргөн түмний минь заяа түшиж Үндэс язгуур, хэл соёлоо Үрийн үрдээ өвлөн бадраая
"Academic"	Öndör törijn min' süld iveež Örgön tümnij min' zajaa tüšiž Ündes jazguur, hel sojoloo Ürijn ürdee övlön badraaja
"Travelguide"	Ondor turin min suld ivej Orgon tumni min zaya tushij Undes yazgur, khel soyolo Urin urde ovlon badraya
"Text message"	Undr tur.n mn svld iwej Urgn tvmni mn zya tvshj Vnds yzgur xel soylo Vr.n vrde uwln badray

Quite different, right? But why? Because languages and alphabets are different, compromises have to be made between things like accuracy and convenience. You may have guessed already how some of these systems made the choice.

"Academic"

"Academic" refers to the typical way of writing words in serious books about Mongolia, which contain footnotes and are written by people who know about Mongolia, for people who know about Mongolia. They generally follow conventions for how Russian words get transliterated. Wiktionary uses a version of this.

"Academic" transliterations are based on the transliteration system used for Russian names, with the exception of ö and ü for ө and ү. (Ө and ү were added to Cyrillic to spell vowels that are found in Mongolian, but not Russian.)  They try to consistently match one English letter to each letter in the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet. This isn’t easy, since the Mongolian alphabet has more letters than the English one, so diacritics (“letters with hats”) are used, like the two dots above ö and ü. They also take care to show long vowels by writing the the vowel twice.

"Travelguide"

"Travelguide" refers to the casual way words get written in travel guide books, news articles, and other stuff which is aimed at a general audience, and doesn’t usually include footnotes. It's less accurate than the first type, but more convenient, because the English letters used are usually pronounced kind of similar to the Cyrillic letters.

"Travelguide" spelling usually spells words with letters that have a similar sound in English to the Mongolian word. For example they write the letter 'y' in words that have a 'y' sound. In many formal works, this sound is spelled with a 'j.' Seeing this, Americans might mispronounce the word.

"Travelguide" transliteration makes concessions to the average English-speaking dude, who is too lazy to deal with things that don’t look English, like long vowels or “letters with hats.” It doesn't do this consistently though, even in the same book, so sometimes you see double vowels, sometimes you don't. So some accuracy is sacrificed for the convenience of people with only 2 weeks to take their vacation.

"Text-Message"

Both of the above types are for the benefit of English readers. But Mongolians have developed their own way of writing to each other in Roman letters, because most cellphones don't have Mongolian keypads. I call this "text-message" style. You also see this in Facebook posts. Lots of Mongolian students spell their names this way too, which confuses foreigners because often it looks different from the way the foreigners think the name should be spelled.

"Text message" transliteration is a different animal altogether, which values extreme conciseness. Mongolian text messages, like American ones, abbreviate ruthlessly. Mongolian text-messages go further than the guidebook version by eliminating most short vowels completely. Often only the first vowel in a word will be spelled. The vowels may be written out for emphasis (like when they don’t think the American will understand what they’re writing).

Luckily, it's often easy to guess what's missing, because restrictions on Mongolian syllable structure usually tell you where short vowels will be, and vowel harmony tells you what vowel will be there. It works so well, in fact, that in Mongolian’s sister language Kalmyk, even standard spelling works this way.

A lot of people will write text messages in their own idiosyncratic ways. For example, Cyrillic letter х is written as x, h, or kh by different people. However, some odd spellings are nearly universal, such as using English letter v to spell Cyrillic letter ү.

Conclusion

This is not an exhaustive comparison, of course, because none of these systems are official. I’ve seen some books that use their own systems. Speakers of Korean, Japanese, and European languages also the Latin alphabet differently to write Mongolian. Nor will I get into the way that traditional Mongolian script is transliterated, which is very different, because it reflects the Mongolian language of 800 years ago. But hopefully I’ve covered it enough that you won’t be lost as to why some names are spelled different ways.

It's also common to mix systems. Lots of books take a middle road between the extremes of "academic" and "travelguide" spelling. This is the way I write words on this blog. I care about accuracy, so I take care to write long vowels with two vowels, and distinguish o, u, ö and ü. However, I prefer letters that suggest the closest English sound, so I write manai instead of manaj for манай. But just in case, I always include the Cyrillic spelling anyway, so anyone who wants to be really sure what the word is can check!

Update August 12, 2015

Running around the web, I've run into another little article about transcribing Mongolian here:

The Transliteration and Transcription of Mongolian

He talks about dialects other than the Khalkha dialect (the one used in the independent country of Mongolia), and is more concerned with transliterating Mongolian script, but he does mention the mess there is of inconsistent systems.