Tangut language

Tangut is the ancient Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Tangut Empire. By some linguists it is classified as belonging to the Qiangic languages. It is only distantly related to Tibetan and Burmese, and possibly also to Chinese.

Related Topics:
Tibeto-Burman - Language - Tangut Empire - Qiangic - Tibetan - Burmese - Chinese

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Among the Qiangic languages one also notably finds Qiang and Rgyalrong.

Related Topics:
Qiang - Rgyalrong

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This is the ancient official language of the Tangut empire (known in Tibetan as Mi-nyag and in Chinese as Xixia 西夏) which obtained its independence from the Chinese Song dynasty at the beginning of the 11th century, and was annihilated by Činggis Qaɣan (commonly known as Gengis Khan) in 1227.

Related Topics:
Song - Činggis Qaɣan - 1227

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The Tangut script, which Sofronov (1968) considered with reason to be one of the most complex in the history of humanity, was created by a decree of the emperor Li Yuanhao 李元昊 in 1038. The invention of the script was bestowed on Yeli Renrong 野利仁荣, a scholar close to the imperial family. After the destruction of the empire, the writing did not completely disappear, and it was used at least until the end of the 15th century.

Related Topics:
Li Yuanhao - 1038

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The majority of Tangut texts were excavated at Kara-koto in 1906 by the expedition of Kozlov, and these documents are at present preserved in Saint-Petersburg. Furthermore, the buddhist canon, and the confucian classics, and a great number of indigenous texts written in Tangut have been preserved.

Related Topics:
Kara-koto - 1906 - Saint-Petersburg

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The connection between the writing and the pronunciation of the Tangut language is even more tenuous than that between Chinese writing and the modern Chinese languages. Thus although on Chinese more than 90% of the characters possess a phonetic element, this proportion is limited to about 10% in Tangut according to Sofronov. The reconstruction of Tangut pronunciation must resort to other sources.

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The discovery of the Fanhan heshi zhangzhongzhu 番汉合时掌中珠, a Tangut-Chinese bilingual glossary, permited Ivanov (1909) and à Laufer (1916) to propose initial reconstructions and to study the comparatie study of Tangut. This glossary in effect indicates the pronuncation of each Tangut character with one or several Chinese characters, and inversely each Chinese character with one or more Tangut characters. The second source is the corpus of Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut. These data were studied for the first time by Nevsky (1925).

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Nonetheless, these two sources were not in themselves sufficient for a systematic reconstruction of Tangut. In effect, these transcriptions were not written with the intention of representing with precision the pronunciation of Tangut, but instead simply to help foreigners to pronounce and memorize the words of one language with the words of another which they could understand.

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The third source, which constitutes the basis of the modern reconstructions, consist of monolingual Tangut dictionaries: the Wenhai 文海, two editions of the Tongyin 同音, the Wenhai zalei 文海杂类 and an untitled dictionary. The record of the pronunciation in these dictionaries is made using the principle of fanqie 反切, borrowed from the Chinese lexicographic tradition. Although these dictionaries may differ on small details (e.g. the Tongyin categorizes the characters according to syllable initial and rhyme without taking any account of tone), they all adopt the same system of 105 rhymes. A certain number or rhymes are in complimentary distribution with respect to the place of articulation of the initials, e.g. rhymes 10 and 11 or rhymes 36 and 37, which shoes that the scholars who composed these dictionaries had made a very precise phonlological analysis of their language.

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In distinction to the transcription in foreign languages, the Tangut fanqie make distinctions among the rhymes in a systematic and very precise manner. Due to the fanqie, we now have a good understanding of the phonological categories of the language. Nonetheless, it is necessary to compare the phonological system of the dictionaries with the other sources in order to “fill in” the categories with a phonetic value.

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