So, since normal Russians are unaware of the variation in the middle stroke of U+042D, and since russian typographers consider it a purely decorative item, why would Mongolians think otherwise?
Indeed, if their goal were to deviate from Russian typographic tradition they wouldn't have adopted the Cyrillic script in the first place, right?...
What's then the story behind the alternate glyph for U+042D and its rationale in the SIL Doulos font as given by the online document <Doulos SIL 4.0 Font Documentation.pdf>?
Some national communities have definite preferences about the form of specific letters, and it is perfectly legitimate for a typeface to address these preferences with variant glyphs as appropriate to the overall design. The best known Cyrillic preference is probably that of Serbian, Montenegran and Macedonian communities for specific italic forms that differ considerably from the international norms established by typical Russian forms. The Mongolian preference refered to in the Doulos documentation is a little dubious, I think, because a) it concerns such a small detail and not a significant variation in letterform comparable to e.g. the Serbian italic forms, and b) unlike Serbian, Mongolian has only been written in Cyrillic for a short period of time and such variant preferences normally derive from long chirographic practice. Frankly, this Mongolian preference looks like the sort of thing that develops when a particular typeface in a particular style becomes recognised as the norm for writing a language, rather than as simply one stylistic possibility.
John Hudson
