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- As Richard Ishida writes: “Unicode encodes separate characters for different sounds for the Mongolian language, regardless of whether the glyph shapes used are identical. (…) The result of this encoding method is that it is impossible to accurately copy Mongolian text from a visual source unless you speak the language well enough to recognise the phonetics of the words involved. It also leads to mistakes when Mongolian speakers type text.” Just by looking at a character you cannot be certain what the signified phoneme is. And one glyph shape may hide one of two different character codes.
- Furthermore, Mongolian orthography, at least in the Mongolian script (not in the Cyrillic script), reflects an archaic pronunciation even if the written Mongolian text is supposed to represent a modern utterance. “For example, if you were to spell out the letters in the following word as written you would get uʤəgulxu, whereas the modern pronunciation is uʤuuləx. (ᠤᠵᠡᠭᠦᠯᠬᠦ)” (Richard Ishida)
- Many Mongolian characters have variant forms, and which variant is to be rendered in each case is not always deducible algorithmically. This forces human intervention by inserting (invisible) control characters.
Unfortunately, no consensus presently exists about which variant forms can be selected automatically by font mechanisms and which others demand that the user select the correct form. This has resulted in different behaviour depending on the font chosen to render Mongolian-script text.
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