Tangut script
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The Tangut script ( Tangut: ; ) was a
logographic In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...
writing system, used for writing the extinct
Tangut language Tangut (Tangut: ; ) is an extinct language in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Tangut was one of the official languages of the Western Xia dynasty, founded by the Tangut people in northwestern China. The Western Xia was annihilated by the Mo ...
of the
Western Xia The Western Xia or the Xi Xia (), officially the Great Xia (), also known as the Tangut Empire, and known as ''Mi-nyak''Stein (1972), pp. 70–71. to the Tanguts and Tibetans, was a Tangut-led Buddhist imperial dynasty of China tha ...
dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants. The Tangut characters are similar in appearance to
Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
, with the same type of
strokes A stroke is a medical condition in which poor blood flow to the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and hemorrhagic, due to bleeding. Both cause parts of the brain to stop funct ...
, but the methods of forming characters in the Tangut writing system are significantly different from those of forming Chinese characters. As in
Chinese calligraphy Chinese calligraphy is the writing of Chinese characters as an art form, combining purely visual art and interpretation of the literary meaning. This type of expression has been widely practiced in China and has been generally held in high este ...
, regular, running, cursive and seal scripts were used in Tangut writing.


History

According to the '' History of Song'' (1346), the script was designed by the high-ranking official Yeli Renrong in 1036. The script was invented in a short period of time, and was put into use quickly. Government schools were founded to teach the script. Official documents were written in the script (with diplomatic ones written bilingually). A great number of
Buddhist scripture Buddhist texts are those religious texts which belong to the Buddhist tradition. The earliest Buddhist texts were not committed to writing until some centuries after the death of Gautama Buddha. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts a ...
s were translated from Tibetan and Chinese, and block printed in the script. Although the dynasty collapsed in 1227, the script continued to be used for another few centuries. The last known example of the script occurs on a pair of Tangut dharani pillars found at
Baoding Baoding (), formerly known as Baozhou and Qingyuan, is a prefecture-level city in central Hebei province, approximately southwest of Beijing. As of the 2010 census, Baoding City had 11,194,382 inhabitants out of which 2,176,857 lived in the b ...
in present-day
Hebei Hebei or , (; alternately Hopeh) is a northern province of China. Hebei is China's sixth most populous province, with over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. The province is 96% Han Chinese, 3% Manchu, 0.8% Hui, an ...
province, which were erected in 1502.


Structure

Tangut characters can be divided into two classes: simple and composite. The latter are much more numerous. The simple characters can be either semantic or phonetic. None of the Tangut characters are pictographic, while the Chinese characters were at the time of their creation; this is one of the major differences between Tangut and Chinese characters. 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 Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
. 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. ''The Sea of Characters'' (Tangut: ; ), a 12th century monolingual Tangut rhyming dictionary, analyzes what other characters each character is derived from. Its analyses illustrate another difference between Tangut and Chinese characters. In Chinese, typically, each semantic component has its own meaning, and each phonetic component its own sound; they contribute this meaning or sound to any complex character they appear in. By contrast, in the ''Sea of Characters'' analysis of Tangut, a component contributes the meaning or sound of some other character that contains it, potentially a different one in every appearance. For example, the component can have the meaning of "bird" ( *dźjwow, of which it is the left side), as in *dze "wild goose" = *dźjwow "bird" + *dze "longevity". But the same component is also used to convey meanings of bone, smoke, food, and time, among others. Some components take different shape depending on what part of the character they appear in (e.g., left side, right side, middle, bottom).


Reconstruction


Unicode

6,125 characters of the Tangut script were included in Unicode version 9.0 in June 2016 in the Tangut block. 755 Radicals and components used in the modern study of Tangut were added to the
Tangut Components Tangut Components is a Unicode block containing components and radicals used in the modern study of the Tangut script The Tangut script ( Tangut: ; ) was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the West ...
block. An iteration mark, , was included in the
Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation is a Unicode block containing symbols and punctuation marks used by ideographic scripts such as Tangut and Nüshu. History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining ...
block. Five additional characters were added in June 2018 with the release of Unicode version 11.0. Six additional characters were added in March 2019 with the release of Unicode version 12.0. A further nine Tangut ideographs were added to the
Tangut Supplement Tangut Supplement is a Unicode block containing characters from the Tangut script, which was used for writing the Tangut language spoken by the Tangut people in the Western Xia Empire, and in China during the Yuan dynasty and early Ming dynasty ...
block and 13 Tangut components were added to the Tangut Components block in March 2020 with the release of Unicode version 13.0. The Tangut Supplement block size was changed in Unicode version 14.0 to correct the erroneous block end point (version 13: → version 14.0: ).


See also


References


Sources

* * * *


External links


Tangut script
at Omniglot
Tangut script
by
Andrew West Andrew or Andy West may refer to: * Andrew West (linguist) (born 1960), English linguist * Andrew West (pianist) (born 1979), English pianist * Andrew Fleming West (1853–1943), American classicist and academic administrator * Andrew J. West ( ...

Sample Tangut characters
at Mojikyo * *
Tangut index
{{Authority control Tanguts Obsolete writing systems 1036 introductions