|
The Tangut script (Chinese: 西夏文 xī xià wén) was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia Dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants.〔 (《西夏文字共有５８６３个正字》 )，宁夏新闻网〕 The Tangut characters are similar in appearance to Chinese characters, with the same type of strokes, but the methods of forming characters in the Tangut writing system are significantly different from those of forming Chinese characters. As in Chinese calligraphy, regular, running, cursive and seal scripts were used in Tangut writing. The codification of the Tangut script in Unicode is still in progress,〔Dr. Richard S. Cook, ("Xīxià Orthography and Unicode: Research notes toward a Unicode encoding of Xīxià (Tangut)" ), Unicode Organization〕 but there are some Tangut fonts available, including the set provided by Mojikyo. According to the ''History of Song'' (1346), the script was designed by the high-ranking official Yeli Renrong under Western Xia Emperor Li Yuanhao's supervision in 1036.〔 (《宋史‧卷四百八十五‧列传第二百四十四‧外国一‧夏国上》 )〕 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 scriptures were translated from Tibetan and Chinese, and block printed in the script.〔 徐庄，(《略谈西夏雕版印刷在中国出版史中的地位》 )，出版学术网〕 Although the dynasty collapsed in 1227, the script continued to be used for another few centuries. The last example of the script occurs on a pair of Tangut dharani pillars found at Baoding (130 km southwest of Beijing), which were erected in 1502. Tangut script has been accepted for inclusion in a future version of Unicode. ==Structure== Tangut characters can be divided into two classes: simple and composite. The latter are more numerous. The simple characters can be either semantic or phonetic. None of the Tangut characters are pictographic, while some of 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. 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tangut script」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|