Talk:Yi script

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Contents 1 Chinese script and Yi script 2 Images? 3 Requests 4 Cannot read

[edit] Chinese script and Yi script

"There is some internal evidence that the Chinese script may not have been originally designed for the Chinese language. Thus we cannot conclude that the Yi got the idea of writing from the Chinese. Indeed, some age estimates would make Yi the older of the two; it's also possible that they derive from a common source."

What is this evidence and where does the suggestion ("some estimates") come from that Yi script is the older of the two? Yi script according to this article has an attested history of 500 years, while the Chinese script has an attested history of more than 3000 years!

I suggest to delete the sentences quoted above. Babelfisch 02:04, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm going on Dingxu Shi's article "The Yi Script" in The World's Writing Systems, Daniels & Bright eds., 1996. Shi gives no reference for this particular statement, but has half a dozen (mostly Chinese) sources in the bibliography. The passage says,

The Yi characters ... have an attested history of five hundred years and an estimated history of up to five thousand years.

I have no idea what the evidence is for these estimates, so I wouldn't object to deleting them. (I would have quoted primary sources if I had them.) I also think my version could stand some sever copy editing. However, I think that the point about Yi not necessarily being derived from Chinese should remain. There's a general if unspoken assumption that because the Han Chinese have been culturally dominant for the past couple millennia, cultural similarities in neighboring minority peoples (such as the Yi script) must either be borrowed from the Han, or based on a Han prototype -- forgetting that the Han were themselves once a nomadic minority adapting cultural innovations from their neighbors.

As for the evidence of the Chinese script (or at least the Oracle Script) not fitting the Chinese language well (specifically the morphology of transitivity, I believe), I don't have a reference offhand. However, there is a comment to the same effect in the Hmong article,

The Liangzhu people are credited with creating proto-characters for today's Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters.

The Liangzhu are said to be the likely ancestors of Jiuli, the first known Miao kingdom, and not ancestral to the Huaxia and therefore the Han Chinese. Certainly the possibility exists that if the (Han) Zhou overthrew a non-Han Shang dynasty, and that some of these people (Miao or not) then emigrated south, they could have carried their script with them, and this could have been the origin of the Yi script. Who knows, the Shang might even have been the Tibeto-Burman ancestors of the Yi. All speculation, of course, but it's equally speculative that the Yi got the idea of writing from the Han 500 years ago. kwami 03:04, 2005 May 20 (UTC)

P.S. Found the statement, "Shang Dynasty people, like the people under ancient Fuxi the Ox Tamer, belonged to the Yi tribal group." on the web, so the idea seems to be floating around. Also, the Hmong article states, "Furthermore, under China's ethnic unification policy, Chiyou [the king of Jiuli] is now also regarded as one of China's forefathers alongside the ethnic Han ancestors, Huangdi and Yandi."

[edit] Images?

This page could really use some images to show what the script looks like! --Reuben 04:03, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Requests

It would be great if someone could create a table of each character and its meaning/pronunciation. Also, is the term "Pinyin" correct here? Is it really pinyin, or should the section be changed to "romanization"? --LakeHMM 06:05, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

You can get the glyphs from the Unicode charts, if you don't mind transfering them!

I'm not sure 'Pinyin' is exactly right, but it is specifically an extension of Pinyin. ("Extended Pinyin" perhaps?) Better than 'romanization', which is almost meaningless. The romanization used here is the official one, an example of how Pinyin has been extended to minority languages in China. (In Shanghainese, for example, the "muddy" consonants are written bb, dd, gg, etc.) kwami 07:53, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cannot read

In the article Yi script, my screen showed only "????? ?? ?? ? ? ? ?". What shall I do/install to read the Yi script? L joo 18:59, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

I can't read it either. I only get a bunch of boxes. Pretty much useless for both of us. --MacRusgail 19:45, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Download a pan-unicode font such as Code2000. --anonymous 16:01, 15 October 2006