Splendid indeed!

Wow. Very cool. It couldn't be too difficult to create a font that duplicates that perfectly, right? Right?

Who am I kidding?

Well, given the complexity of some recent script fonts, maybe it’s achievable. I don’t know about the challenges of vertical right to left setting, though.

Vertical right to left shouldn't be too hard. That's just standard turned on its side. (given a word processor that can rotate the letters 90° and the textblock likewise)

Yes, directionality for Mongolian is fairly simple, and Mongolian fonts are typically made to work horizontally and the text block rotated by the software.

…so this might be easier to transcribe:-)

You know- if someone handed me that rotated image and said it was latin, I could spend hours trying to decipher it.

Splendid. It's the only child of Aramaic script I know, written vertically!

That really is stunning, reminds me of really intense european scripts from the middle ages, and hieriatic script from the Egyptians.

Very intriguing theory too, have you considered that the mutation of script may coincide with the periodic shifts in pronunciation that it's verbal companion takes?

@Nick: Shouldn’t the image be rotated the other way?

IIRC I flipped and rotated it, to get what most looks like Latin script writing, IMO.

The connection between Mongolian/Manchu writing and Aramaic, via Sogdian and Uighur, is well established. But the Uighurs (a Turkic people of Western China) were the first to rotate the Sogdian script and write/read it vertically, presumably in imitation of Chinese writing (but read columns left-to-write).* The Mongolians adopted and adapted the old Uighur script. There is some scant evidence of Mongolian being written in other Chinese-style scripts, such as Kitan, also vertically, prior to the adoption of the Uighur script.

*Later, after their conversion to Islam, the Uighurs adopted the nastaliq style of Perso-Arabic script, so their old script now survives primarily in the Mongolian context.

John, if you haven't you might want to consider checking out some of the many varieties of Tibetan script. In addition to a "colloquial" cursive pen script, there are a number of other cursive styles used for commentaries and exegesis on Tibetan religious texts. On this page, the third of the three writing styles is one of several less formal cursive forms. http://nalandatranslation.org/offerings/the-vidyadharas-poetry/

I do remember that for a time, the Mongolians used a lapidary script that was derived from the Tibetan script. This was around the time of Kublai Khan, so it was very long ago.

Ah, here we are. It was called Phags-Pa.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Phags-pa_script

http://babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/12/phags-pa-fonts-3-babelstone-phags-pa.html

My slip of the tongue: I wanted to write Phoenician, not Aramaic.
Tibetan script wasn't so handy like the abjad, which also made the Uighurs' conversion to Arabic so easy, because of similarity of the scripts.
Probably some minorities (or their monks rather) still use the script in China?