List members might find information on work being done on Xi Xia (Tangut) Script to be of interest. ---------------------------------------- Prof. GONG Hwang-cherng and his colleagues in the Institute of Linguistics at Academia Sinica in Taiwan have been working for the past several years to create an outline font of the large Xi Xia (Tangut) character set, to be employed in the production of a forth-coming dictionary. The CIDFont for this project at present encodes approximately 5400 characters, the style of which is exemplified in this PDF: http://stedt.berkeley.edu/pdf/Tangut-sample.pdf Structurally, the script employs some 400 classifiers, and composite characters are produced from components by processes similar to those at work in the Chinese script. As Chinese scholars have remarked, the Tangut script is visually similar enough to Chinese to cause headaches: as though Chinese characters were put in a mirror and turned upside-down or inside-out. With texts dating from the 11th-13th c., Tangut is a dead Sino-Tibetan (ST) language of uncertain position within the ST family. The capital of the Xi Xia (a.k.a. Da Xia, Baishang, Tangute, Tangut) people was present day Yinchuan (in Ningxia Province, on the Inner Mongolian border), between Helan Mountain and the west bank of the Yellow River. In 1208 A.D. their territiory extended west of this some 1500 kilometers, south to Qinghai Lake, and north to Mongolia. Some scholars have argued that Tangut is closely related to the Qiangic languages, while others argue that there is no real linguistic evidence for an especially close relation with Qiangic. The Tangut language is read only by a handful of specialists, such as Prof. LIN Ying-chin (colleague and student of Prof. GONG), who contributes her reconstruction work to augment STEDT's Tangut data. ---------------------------------------- Richard S. COOK, Jr. STEDT Project, Linguistics Department University of California, Berkeley http://stedt.berkeley.edu/
