{"id":287,"date":"2011-03-02T21:29:13","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T05:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=287"},"modified":"2011-05-15T18:45:12","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T01:45:12","slug":"jurchen-scripts-1119-ad-and-1138-ad-northeast-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/02\/jurchen-scripts-1119-ad-and-1138-ad-northeast-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Jurchen Scripts — 1119 AD and 1138 AD, Northeast China"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jurchen "year"<\/p><\/div>\n

The Khitan (AKA Liao) Empire was in charge in Manchuria (northeastern China) for a while, and the local Jurchen people used the Khitan script<\/a> and Chinese script<\/a> for their writing.\u00a0 They rebelled and overthrew their Khitan overlords in 1115, and four years later, at the new emperor’s request, Wanyan Xiyin<\/a> made a new script for Jurchen, called “Large Script”.\u00a0 In 1138, Emperor Xizong<\/a> made a new script (called “Small Script”).<\/p>\n

Jurchen got most of its glyph shapes from Chinese script and Khitan script.\u00a0 In addition to logograms, they had many phonetic characters which were used for word endings and for words which didn’t have a logogram.\u00a0 The phonetic characters were usually syllables, but they also had standalone vowels and syllables that were “vowel+n”.\u00a0 I have no idea how to classify that: sort of an inverse abjad?\u00a0 This just shows how complex writing systems are!<\/p>\n

Note that Jurchen came from Chinese and Khitan; Khitan came from Chinese but with inspiration from Old Uyghur<\/a>; Old Uyghur came from Sogdian<\/a>; Sogdian came from Aramaic<\/a> or Syriac<\/a>; Syriac came from Aramaic; Aramaic came from Phoenician<\/a>.\u00a0 It might have taken 2000 years, but Phoenician’s descendants spread eastwards 6000 miles, across a continent, before internal combustion engines.\u00a0 That’s pretty cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Khitan (AKA Liao) Empire was in charge in Manchuria (northeastern China) for a while, and the local Jurchen people used the Khitan script and Chinese script for their writing.\u00a0 They rebelled and overthrew their Khitan overlords in 1115, and … 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":[34,8,25,27,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inventor-known","category-logograms-language-types","category-national-pride","category-whoa","category-syllabaries-language-types"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","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=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}