Blackwell Reference Online

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A variety of western Mongolian, the Kalmyk language, which is also known as Kalmyk-Oirat or Qalmaq, has a literary tradition going back to the mid-seventeenth century ce when an alphabet for the language was derived from the Uighur-Mongolian script by J̌aya Pandita (1599-1662), Chief Lama of Dzungaria ( table 2 ). Like the Mongolian script it runs from top to bottom in vertical columns shifting from left to right. Each letter appears in three forms: initial, medial and final. This script was used until 1927. Under Soviet rule a Cyrillic orthography was introduced in 1923 which was replaced in 1931 by the Latin alphabet. However, as of 1938 Kalmyk was once again written in Cyrillic. See also mongolian writing . Reading Aalto 1964. Table 2 The Kalmyk alphabet ... log in or subscribe to read full text