Yelü Diela () was the younger brother of the Liao dynasty founder

Yelü Abaoji Abaoji (872 – 6 September 926), posthumously known by his temple name as the Emperor Taizu of Liao, was a Khitan people, Khitan leader and the founding Emperor of China, emperor of the Liao dynasty of China, ruling from 916 to 926. He had a Sin ...

. He invented the "

Khitan small script The Khitan small script () was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language. It was used during the 10th–12th century by the Khitan people, who had created the Liao Empire in present-day northeastern China. In addition to ...

" to accommodate the more

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

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 ...

around the year 925. The script was based partly on the earlier "

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 ...

" or Chinese-like

logographic In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese c ...

writing, but was also inspired by the vertically written

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 ...

that was shown to him by an ambassador.

History of Liao History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some theorists categ ...

, Chapter 64 (《辽史第六十四卷表第二皇子表》)

References

External links

Liao (Khitan) literature and script
Creators of writing systems Year of death unknown Year of birth unknown {{Writingsystem-stub Diela 10th-century Khitan people 10th-century linguists