The Khitan small script () was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct

Khitan language Khitan or Kitan ( in large Khitan script, large script or in small Khitan script, small, ''Khitai''; , ''Qìdānyǔ''), also known as Liao, is an extinct language once spoken in Northeast Asia by the Khitan people (4th to 13th century CE). It wa ...

. It was used during the 10th–12th century by the

Khitan people The Khitan people (Khitan small script: ; ) were a historical Eurasian nomads, nomadic people from Northeast Asia who, from the 4th century, inhabited an area corresponding to parts of modern Mongolia, Northeast China and the Russian Far East. ...

, who had created the Liao Empire in present-day northeastern China. In addition to the small script, the Khitans simultaneously also used a functionally independent writing system known as the

Khitan large script The Khitan large script () was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language (the other was the Khitan small script). It was used during the 10th–12th centuries by the Khitan people, who had created the Liao Empire in no ...

. Both Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the

Jurchens Jurchen (, ; , ) is a term used to collectively describe a number of East Asian people, East Asian Tungusic languages, Tungusic-speaking people. They lived in northeastern China, also known as Manchuria, before the 18th century. The Jurchens wer ...

for several decades after the fall of the Liao dynasty, until the Jurchens fully switched to a script of their own. Examples of the scripts appeared most often on

epitaph An epitaph (; ) is a short text honoring a deceased person. Strictly speaking, it refers to text that is inscribed on a tombstone or plaque, but it may also be used in a figurative sense. Some epitaphs are specified by the person themselves be ...

s and

monuments A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical ...

, although other fragments sometimes surface.

History

The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela. He drew his inspiration from "the

Uyghur language Uyghur or Uighur (; , , or , , ), formerly known as Turki or Eastern Turki, is a Turkic languages, Turkic language with 8 to 13 million speakers (), spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western ...

and script", which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was originally thought to be a daughter script of the

Old Uyghur alphabet The Old Uyghur alphabet was a list of alphabets used by Turkic languages, Turkic script used for writing Old Uyghur, a variety of Old Turkic spoken in Turpan and Gansu that is the ancestor of the modern Western Yugur language. The term "Old Uyghu ...

Description

Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, yet still "able to record any word." While small-script inscriptions employed some logograms as well, most words in small script were made using a blocked system reminiscent of the later

Hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

writing of

Korea Korea is a peninsular region in East Asia consisting of the Korean Peninsula, Jeju Island, and smaller islands. Since the end of World War II in 1945, it has been politically Division of Korea, divided at or near the 38th parallel north, 3 ...

, meaning that a word is represented by one group (square block) composed of several

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s with individual phonetic meanings (somewhat similar to the '' jamo'' units of Hangul). Unlike Hangul's ''jamo'', a Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant pair as well. Each block could incorporate two to seven such "phonetic element" characters, written in pairs within the block, with the first half of the pair on the left. If there were an odd number of characters in a block, the unpaired character would be centered below the preceding pair. Although there is some speculation, it appears there are no characters that both the small and large scripts share. Periodically, epitaphs written using small script will be written using the large script method of

linearity In mathematics, the term ''linear'' is used in two distinct senses for two different properties: * linearity of a '' function'' (or '' mapping''); * linearity of a '' polynomial''. An example of a linear function is the function defined by f(x) ...

. Although small script had some similarities to Chinese, Khitan characters were often used to record Chinese words. The appearance of a likeness between a small script and a Chinese character does not help in the reading of Khitan. For example, the Chinese character for 'mountain' () is the same as the Khitan small script logogram for 'gold' (), and, thus, the name of the Jin dynasty. Of the 378 known small script characters, 125 are

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

, 115 are

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

, and the remainder have not been deciphered. (Usually, it was possible to guess the phonetic value of an element if it has been used to transcribe a Chinese loanword in a Khitan inscription; otherwise, such phonetic values are hard to determine, as very little of the Khitan language is known.) Small script uses a mixture of logograms, syllabograms, and, as some as sources claim, a few single sound phonograms. Sometimes

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

es were written with syllabograms, just as single syllables sometimes were written with three syllabograms (with one each for the initial, medial, and final sounds of the syllable). Sometimes the initial

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

of syllables are indicated to be dental, labial,

guttural Guttural Phone (phonetics), speech sounds are those with a primary place of articulation near the back of the oral cavity, where it is difficult to distinguish a sound's place of articulation and its phonation. In popular usage it is an imprecise t ...

, or

nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery * ...

etc., based on the syllabograms involved. Additionally,

vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

are sometimes indicated to be labial or non-labial, or pronounced in the front or back of the mouth. Much of this information came from the "Khitan Script Research Group", led by the Mongolian scholar named Chinggeltei, who used monuments,

calendar A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A calendar date, date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is ...

, and similar Chinese texts to decipher sections of small script. A particularly valuable object of their study was the inscription on the ''Dà Jīn huángdì dūtǒng jīnglüè lángjūn xíngjì'' () stele, which is the only known bilingual Chinese-Khitan inscription. Produced during the Jurchen Jin dynasty it, ironically, was originally (before the discovery of other Khitan inscriptions in 1922) thought to be in Jurchen.

Corpus

There are no surviving examples of printed texts in the Khitan language, and aside from five example Khitan large characters with Chinese glosses in a book on calligraphy written by Tao Zongyi () during the mid 14th century, there are no Chinese glossaries or dictionaries of Khitan. The main source of Khitan texts are monumental inscriptions, mostly comprising memorial tablets buried in the tombs of Khitan nobility. There are about 33 known monuments with inscriptions in the Khitan small script, ranging in date from 1053 to 1171.

Encoding

The Khitan small script was added to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

version 13.0 in March 2020. 471 graphic characters are located in the Khitan Small Script block, while a single invisible filler character () is located in the Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation block. The filler is inserted following the first character of a cluster, and denotes a character cluster laid out with one character on the first line, as opposed to the usual two.

Notes

References

Bibliography

* * * *

External links

Khitan script on OmniglotLinguist List – Description of Kitan
*

(brush style, 3 layouts or orientations)

(thinner "serif" Song-style, horizontal orientation only) {{list of writing systems Khitan scripts Khitans Obsolete writing systems