Published: 13th July, 2016
Last edited: 3rd July, 2016
Created: 23rd June, 2016
My take on the Mongolian Horizontal Square script designed by Mongolian spiritual leader Zanabazar to write Mongolian, Tibetan and Sanskrit. It's based on the Tibetan script. The script consists mostly of straight lines and right angles and seemed like a prime candidate for a FontStruct treatment. I've added rounded corners and serifs to make it more visually interesting.
The script has been accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee for inclusion in a future version of the Unicode standard*. This font uses an ad-hoc mapping to Ascii characters: upper case for aspirated plosives, 'f' and 'q' for retroflex plosives and a lot of mappings that make even less sense as I started to run out of Latin letters. The mapping is based on Sanskrit and Tibetan; Mongolian uses some characters differently. However, the font does not do stacked consonants required by the two former.
The script is an abugida: the letter ‹a› is inherent in each consonant letter and the vowel is then modified using diacritics. Initial vowels are written with a special letter, mapped to 'A', that's wider than the rest and has its own set of diacritics, mapped to digits 0–9.
* http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14024-zanabazar-square.pdf