Zanabazar Square Alphabet Table

Zanabazar (1635-1723), the First Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, was Mongolia’s most celebrated monk-artist-scholar. Building on the Tibetan alphabet, he designed this square-faced abugida to write Mongolian - and, in a geometric register, Classical Tibetan and Sanskrit. Wikipedia also notes the biography about him was itself written in the horizontal square script, a rare case of a script documenting its own inventor.

The script fell out of use after its creator’s era, and Wikipedia’s account is blunt: it was re-discovered in 1801, and its applications during its using period are not known - no continuous textual tradition connects the manuscripts. What scholars can reconstruct comes from the surviving specimens themselves, which is why the letter inventory is clear while the sociolinguistic history stays silent.

In an abugida each consonant letter denotes a syllable with an inherent vowel - here /a/ - and other vowels are written as diacritics above or below the consonant. Only the vowel /a/ exists as a full independent letter; other word-initial vowels attach their diacritic to a filler letter. The killer stroke (virama) removes the inherent vowel to leave a bare consonant. The chart above encodes every piece of that machine as its own row.

Twenty basic consonants (KA through NA) cover Mongolian; twenty more (PA through KSSA, including the Tibetan-style TSA series) exist to transcribe Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese loanwords precisely. The split is the script’s two lives in one inventory: a native writing system and a scholarly transcription face for the Buddhist canon - and the note column tags which half each row belongs to.

No - they are two separate scripts by the same prolific inventor, and two separate Unicode blocks: Zanabazar Square at U+11A00, Soyombo at U+11A50. Both are geometric square-faced designs, but the Soyombo script is the one with the famous head emblem; the square script is the Tibetan-derived abugida charted here.