Re: Mongolian place names

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>  http://www.fallingrain.com/world/MG/a/

This uses several different transcriptions at once. You'll notice that often 
the same name appears several times on the same page in different 
transcriptions.

>  http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=80013

I'm too lazy to get "trial free access". :-)

>  Mongolian and Russian literation are not coincidental, since some
> Mongolian pronounciations cannot be approximated by Russian letters,

That's true, but both languages have both b and v and use the same two 
letters to write them.

> and then there's
> the Sanskrit-based vertical writing that was current before Mongolia
> became a Communist territory way back when.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm

It's (indirectly) based on Syrian, it's still used in Inner Mongolia, and 
apparently there are some efforts to reintroduce it in Mongolia, though that 
doesn't seem to get far. The website gives some hints at why the orthography 
of the Mongolian script is about as medieval as the English one.