Monthly Photos Mar 2026 : Typing the Mongolian Script

Photos taken by ILCAA staff and associates are posted here once a month; most of them are taken during their field research in Asia and Africa. (The copyright belongs to the photographers.)

This typewriter, preserved at the Institute of Language and Literature of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, was designed for inputting the Mongolian script.

Although the Mongolian script is an alphabetic system similar to Arabic, its graphemic units exhibit distinct positional allographs depending on their occurrence in word-initial, medial, or final positions. In other words, a single phoneme is represented not by an invariant form, but by a set of contextually conditioned graphic variants.

To accommodate this structural feature, the typewriter does not assign a single key to each phoneme. Instead, separate keys are provided for each grapheme’s positional allographs.

For example, the leftmost key on the fourth row, the third key from the right on the third row, and the sixth key from the right on the first row correspond to the initial, medial, and final allographs of the grapheme representing the phoneme /n/, respectively.

Within the limited space of a keyboard, this layout reflects the ingenuity and practical problem-solving strategies of designers.

February 6, 2026
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
YAMAKOSHI, Yasuhiro