Tangut script

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The Tangut script is logographic, used for writing the Tangut language. According to the latest count, there are 5863 Tangut characters excluding variants.^[1] As in Chinese calligraphy, there are the regular, running, cursive and seal scripts in Tangut writing.

According to Songshi (宋史 "History of Song Dynasty"), the script was designed by the high-ranked official Yeli Renrong under Emperor Li Yuanhao's supervision in 1036.^[2] The script was invented in a short period of time, and was put into use quickly. Governmental schools were founded to teach the script. Official documents were written in the script (with the diplomatic ones written bilingually). A great number of Buddhist scriptures were translated from Tibetan and Chinese, and block printed in the script.^[3]

Although the Tangut characters look like Chinese characters at first sight, the methods of forming Tangut characters are significantly different from those of forming Chinese characters. The unicodification of the Tangut script is still in progress,^[4] but Mojikyo contains fonts for it.

[edit] Structure

The Tangut character for "man", a simple character

Tangut characters can be divided into two classes: simple and composite. The latter are more numerous. The simple characters can be either semantic or phonetic. None of the Tangut characters are pictographic, while some of the Chinese characters were at the time of their creations; this is one of the major differences between Tangut and Chinese characters.

The Tangut character "mud" is made with part of the character "water" and the whole of the character "soil"

Most composite characters comprise two components. A few comprise three or four. A component can be a simple character, or part of a composite character. The composite characters include semantic-semantic ones and semantic-phonetic ones. A few special composite characters were made for transliterating Chinese and Sanskrit.

The Tangut characters for "finger" (right) and "toe", a pair of mirror images

There are a number of pairs of special composite characters worth noting. The members of such a pair have the same components, only the location of the components in them is different (e.g. AB vs. BA, ABC vs. ACB). The members of such a pair have very similar meanings.

[edit] References

• Eric Grinstead, Analysis of the Tangut Script, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series No. 10, Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1972.
• (Chinese) 史金波，〈略论西夏文字的构造〉，《民族语文论集》，北京：中国社会科学出版社，1981，192-226頁。
• (Japanese) 西田龍雄，『西夏文字 : その解讀のプロセス』，東京：紀伊國屋書店， 1994。
• E.I. Kychanov, "Tangut", in Peter T. Daniels & William Bright (ed.), The World's Writing Systems, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0195079930, pp. 228-9.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ (Chinese) 《西夏文字共有５８６３个正字》，宁夏新闻网
2. ^ (Chinese) 《宋史‧卷四百八十五‧列传第二百四十四‧外国一‧夏国上》
3. ^ (Chinese) 徐庄，《略谈西夏雕版印刷在中国出版史中的地位》，出版学术网
4. ^ Dr. Richard S. Cook, "Xīxià Orthography and Unicode: Research notes toward a Unicode encoding of Xīxià (Tangut)", Unicode Organization

[edit] External links

• Omniglot page with sample characters
• About some Tangut coins, plus some useful Chinese links
• (Japanese) Sample Tangut characters as shown at Mojikyo
• (Chinese) 史金波，《西夏文字是有规律的文字吗？》，宁夏新闻网