Tangut language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Tangut | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | — | |
| Region: | — | |
| Total speakers: | — | |
| Language family: | Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman Qiangic (disputed) Tangut | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | to be added | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | txg | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Tangut (also Xixia) is an ancient northerneastern Tibeto-Burman language once spoken in the Tangut Empire. By some linguists it is classified as one of the Qiangic languages, among which one also finds Qiang and rGyalrong. It is distantly related to Tibetan and Burmese, and possibly also to Chinese.
Tangut was the official language of the Tangut empire (known in Tibetan as Mi-nyag and in Chinese as Xixia 西夏), inhabited by the Tangut people, 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.
The Tangut language has its own script, namely the Tangut script. Occasionally, for religious documents, the Tangut language was written in Tibetan script.
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[edit] Rediscovery
The latest text (a piece of Buddhist sutra) we can find written in the Tangut language dates to 1502, which means that the language was still in use three hundred years after the annihilation of the Tangut Empire.
The majority of extant Tangut texts were excavated at Khara-Khoto in 1906 by Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov, and these documents are at present preserved in the Saint Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. The collections amounts to about 10,000 volumes, of mostly Buddhist texts, law codes and legal documents dating from mid-11th up to early 13th centuries. Among the Buddhist texts a number of unique compilations, not known neither in Chinese nor in Tibetan versions were recently discovered. Furthermore, the Buddhist canon, the Confucian classics, and a great number of indigenous texts written in Tangut have been preserved. These other major Tangut collections, though much smaller in size, belong to the British Museum, National Library in Beijing, Library of Beijing University and other libraries.
The research of Tangut script began as early as early 20th century when M. Maurisse first acquired a copy of Tangut "Lotus sutra", which was partially researched by some unknown Chinese scholar. After the discovery of Khara-Khoto library by P. K. Kozlov the script was identified as the one belonging to the Tangut state of Xixia, and actual research had began. Such scholars as A. I. Ivanov, Ishihama Juntaro, B. Laufer, Luo Fuchang (羅福萇), Luo Fucheng (羅福成), Wang Jingru (王靜如) contributed into the research of the Tangut language.
[edit] Reconstrution
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.
The discovery of the Fanhan heshi zhangzhongzhu (番漢合時掌中珠), a Tangut-Chinese bilingual glossary, permitted Ivanov (1909) and Laufer (1916) to propose initial reconstructions and to study the comparative study of Tangut. This glossary in effect indicates the pronunciation 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 (Nevskij) (1925).
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.
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 (文海雜類) and an untitled dictionary. The record of the pronunciation in these dictionaries is made using the principle of fanqie, 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 complementary distribution with respect to the place of articulation of the initials, e.g. rhymes 10 and 11 or rhymes 36 and 37, which shows that the scholars who composed these dictionaries had made a very precise phonological analysis of their language.
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.
The biggest achievement in the field belongs to N. A. Nevsky, who managed to reconstruct Tangut grammar and provide the first Tangut-Chinese-English dictionary, which together with the collection of his papers was published posthumously in 1960 under the title "Tangut Philology" (Moscow: 1960). Later, substantial contribution to the research of Tangut language was done by Nishida Tatsuo (西田龍雄), K.B. Kepping, Hwang-cherng Gong (龔煌城), M.V. Sofronov, Li Fanwen (李范文). As of now, there are three Tangut dictionaries available: one original one composed by N.A. Nevsky, the other two composed by Li Fanwen and E.I. Kychanov respectively.
As of now, there is growing a school of Tangut studies in China. Leading scholars include Shi Jinbo (史金波), Li Fanwen, Nie Hongyin (聶鴻音), Bai Bin (白濱) in mainland China, and Hwang-cherng Gong and Lin Yingjin (林英津) in Taiwan. In other countries, leading scholars in the field include E. I. Kychanov and his student K. J. Solonin in Russia, Nishida Tatsuo and Arakawa Shintaro (荒川慎太郎) in Japan, and Ruth w. Dunnell in the USA.
[edit] Bibliography
Shintaro Arakawa. (荒川慎太郎). "西夏語通韻字典" ("Tangut Rhyme Dictionary"). 『言語学研究』 Linguistic Research Vol. 16 (1997): 1-153.
_____ "夏藏対音資料からみた西夏語の声調 ("A Study on Tangut Tones from Tibetan Transcriptions") 『言語学研究』 (Linguistic Research) Vol. 17-18 (1999): 27-44.
Gong Hwangcherng (龚煌城) 1999. 西夏语的紧元音及其起源 ("Xixia tense vowels and their origin") ，中央研究院历史语言 研究所集刊. (Collected Papers of the Historical Linguistics Center of the Central Research Institute) 70.2: 531-558
_____ 2001. 西夏语动词的人称呼应音韵转换("Rime transformation and person agreement in Xixia verbs")，语言暨语言学(Language and Linguistics). 2.1: 21-67
Ivanov, A. 1909 Zur kenntnis der Hsi-hsia Sprache, Izvestia Akademii nauk
Kepping, Ksenia B. 1971. "A category of aspect in Tangut," trans. E. Grinstead. Acta Orientalia 33:283-294.
_____. 1975. "Subject and object agreement in the Tangut verb". trans. J. A. Matisoff. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 2.2:219-232.
_____. 1979. "Elements of ergativity and nominativity in Tangut." in Ergativity: towards a theory of grammatical relations, ed. Frans Plank, 263-277. London: Academic Press.
_____. 1979. Sun' tszy v tangutskom perevode: Faksimile ksilografa. Izdanie teksta, perovod, vvedenie, kommentarii, grammaticheskii ocherk, slover' i prilozhenie (Pamiatniki pis'mennosti vostoka 49) [Sun Tsz in Tangut translation: Facsimile of wood-engravings. Publication of text, translation, introduction, commentary, grammatical sketch, dictionary, and appendices (Literary texts of the East 49)]. Moscow, Nauka, 579p.
_____. 1981. "Agreement of the verb in Tangut." Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 6. 1:39-48.
_____. 1982. "Deictic motion verbs in Tangut." Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 6.2:77-82.
_____. 1982. "Once again on the agreement of the Tangut verb." Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 7. 1:39-54.
_____. 1989. 西夏语的结构 [Xixiayu de jiegou] (The structure of the Tangut language). 中国民族史研究[Zhongguo minzu shi yanjiu] (Studies on the history of the nationalities of China) 2, ed. Bai Bin, Shi Jinbo, Lu Xun, and Gao Wende, 312-326. Beijing: 中央民族学院出版社 [Zhongyang Minzu Xueyuan Chubanshe]. Central Institute of Nationalities Press.
Kepping, Ksenia B., V. S. Kolokolov, E. I. Kychanov, and A. P. Terent'ov Katanskii. 1969. More pis'men: Faksimile tangutskikh ksilografov. Perevod s tangutskogo, vstupitel'nye stat'i i prelozheniia [Sea of characters: Facsimile of Tangut wood-engravings. Translation from Tangut, and intruductory articles and appendices] (Literary texts of the East 16). Moscow: Nauka [495p., 108 plates, 217p.]
Laufer, B. 1916. "The Si-hia Language, a study in Indo-chinese Philology." T'oung Pao. Vol. 17
Li Fanwen (李范文) 1980. 西夏研究论集，宁夏人民出版社 A Compilation of Xixia research. Ningxia People's Press.
_____. 1998. 夏汉词典，中国社会科学院出版社 Xixia-Chinese Dictionary. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Press.
Nevsky, N.A. 1925 A brief manual of the Si-hia characters with Tibetan transcriptions. Osaka.
Sofronov, M.V. (Софронов М. В). 1968 Грамматика тангутского языка (Tangut grammar), Moscow : Nauka
