Вчимо монгольську (жартую)
П'ятниця, 9 Червень 2017 17:06Q: What is the Mongolian vowel separator for?
I've heard of the Mongolian vowel separator from programmers, who regard it as an interesting quirk in Unicode. When I google for it, most of the hits are from those revelling in its geekiness.
But as someone dabbling a bit in Mongolian, I'd like to know: What is it used for?
A:
The formal description has been already given in the excellent @ColinFine's answer. Let me give a different description in "layman terms".
Mongolian characters usually have four distinct forms: isolate, initial, medial, and final.
Vowels A
and E
have exactly the same glyphs in their final form.
Here are the four forms for A
and E
, correspondingly.
Note, both have two versions of final glyphs:
Although choosing between A
or E
can be concluded from the the syntax (A
for masculine grammatic gender while E
is for feminine), there can be semantic difference depending on the final form (stroke up or stroke down).
For example:
[qara]
(to look), stroke up;
[qar+a]
(black), stroke down;