Mongolian is a Unicode block containing characters for dialects of Mongolian, Manchu, and Sibe languages. It is traditionally written in vertical lines Top-Down, right across the page, although the Unicode code charts cite the characters rotated to horizontal orientation as this is the orientation of glyphs in a font that supports layout in vertical orientation.
The Mongolian Unicode block contains its own variation selectors (listed as format controls) for use with the traditional Mongolian alphabet:[5]
U+180B Mongolian free variation selector one (FVS1)
U+180C Mongolian free variation selector two (FVS2)
U+180D Mongolian free variation selector three (FVS3)
U+180F Mongolian free variation selector four (FVS4)
Additional variations may be also available for traditional Mongolian script characters according to the context of the character, or by using a zero-width joiner (ZWJ, U+200D) and/or a zero width non-joiner (ZWNJ, U+200C) to select the specific form. The block also contains a format control named "Mongolian vowel separator" (MVS, U+180E).
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Mongolian block:
Aliprand, Joan; Winkler, Arnold (1996-12-18), "4.3 Mongolian", Preliminary Minutes - UTC #71 & X3L2 #168 ad hoc meeting, San Diego - December 5-6, 1996
Moore, Lisa (2013-02-04), "Consensus 134-C16", UTC #134 Minutes, Change the general category of U+180E MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR from Zs to Cf, for Unicode 6.3.
Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2014-01-28), "11.1.2 Presentation of Vertical scripts (Mongolian and Phags-pa)", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 61, Holiday Inn, Vilnius, Lithuania; 2013-06-10/14
Moore, Lisa (2016-02-01), "Consensus 146-C14", UTC #146 Minutes, Change general category of U+1885 and U+1886 from "Lo" to "Mn", bidi from "L" to "NSM", in Unicode 9.0.
Moore, Lisa (2017-02-08), "Consensus 150-C25", UTC #150 Minutes, Update Standardizedvariants.txt for Mongolian per document L2/17-035R, for Unicode 10.0.
Moore, Lisa (2018-05-09), "Action item 155-A34", UTC #155 Minutes, Add an annotation to Nameslist to note that TODO SOFT HYPHEN is also used for Hudum, for Unicode 11.0.
Liang, Hai (2019-07-26), "3.1 Eligible for a future revision of the chart font [Affects U+1834, U+1871, and U+1878]", Preliminary analysis of L2/19-221 (WG2 N5073), China national body's comments on Mongolian
Liang, Hai (2019-07-26), "3.1 Eligible for a future revision of the chart font [Affects U+1834, U+1871, and U+1878]", Preliminary analysis of L2/19-221 (WG2 N5073), China national body's comments on Mongolian
