{"id":283,"date":"2011-03-01T23:31:23","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T07:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=283"},"modified":"2011-05-15T18:45:46","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T01:45:46","slug":"khitan-scripts-920-ad-and-925-ad-mongolia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/01\/khitan-scripts-920-ad-and-925-ad-mongolia\/","title":{"rendered":"Khitan scripts — 920 AD and 925 AD, Mongolia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Khitan small seal "hen" (word)<\/p><\/div>\n

Emperor Taizu<\/a> of the Khitan (AKA Liao) people introduced a script in 920 AD for his nomadic Mongolian nation. They had been using Chinese script<\/a>, but the Chinese script was\u00a0 a poor fit for the Khitan language.\u00a0 Spoken Khitan had many syllables per word, unlike more monosyllabic spoken Chinese.<\/p>\n

Taizu’s script (called “Large Seal”) was logographic and only a few symbols have been decipered.\u00a0 It clearly was influenced by Chinese, as there are a handful of symbols (particularly those used in dates and numbers) which are identical.<\/p>\n

Only five years later, Taizu’s younger brother Diela<\/a> came up with another script after a visit from the Uyghur ambassador.\u00a0 The ambassador showed Diela the Old Uyghur script<\/a>, and something in the Old Uyghar script convinced Diela that he could make a better script than one the Emperor endorsed.\u00a0 This seems foolish to me, but I wasn’t there at the time, and Diela’s script (called “Small Seal”, duh) ended up in wide use amongst the Khitan people.<\/p>\n

One innovation that Diela came up with was to show word boundaries by grouping syllable glyphs into word-blocks.\u00a0 Words had one to seven syllables, and they would all be crammed into one word-block, with an arrangement like Maya script<\/a>: two wide, left-to-right, top-to-bottom.\u00a0 If there was an odd number, the last syllable would be horizontally centered, as shown in the block of glyphs above. The word blocks were then laid out linearly.<\/p>\n

Small seal consisted of some logograms and some consisted of phonetic syllables, but only a fraction have been deciphered; the language died and there aren’t that many bilingual texts.<\/p>\n

The Khitans used both scripts, but not in the same text (that we know of), and it isn’t clear why they used one sometimes and the other sometimes.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emperor Taizu of the Khitan (AKA Liao) people introduced a script in 920 AD for his nomadic Mongolian nation. They had been using Chinese script, but the Chinese script was\u00a0 a poor fit for the Khitan language.\u00a0 Spoken Khitan had … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,34,23,8,11,27,7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abjad","category-inventor-known","category-language-unknown","category-logograms-language-types","category-previous-script-didnt-quite-work","category-whoa","category-syllabaries-language-types","category-undeciphered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}