{"id":330,"date":"2011-03-17T23:16:56","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T06:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=330"},"modified":"2011-04-02T22:23:37","modified_gmt":"2011-04-03T05:23:37","slug":"classic-yi-700-1485-ad-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/17\/classic-yi-700-1485-ad-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Yi &#8212; 700? 1485? AD, China"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_332\" style=\"width: 110px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/yiFir.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-332\" class=\"size-full wp-image-332\" title=\"yiFir\" src=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/yiFir.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"65\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-332\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yi &quot;fir&quot;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>For a very long time, the Yi people used a logographic script to write their language. Their tradition says that it was created by someone named Aki in around 700 AD, but the earliest record is from 1485 AD.<\/p>\n<p>Mostly the Yi priests used it for religious, magical, or medical texts.\u00a0 The literacy rate was very low (less than 3% in 1956), so kids weren&#8217;t using it to write to Grandma.\u00a0 They didn&#8217;t have a strong central government, so didn&#8217;t use it as a bureaucratic language.\u00a0 They didn&#8217;t appear to use it for accounting or records; when they communicated with the outside world, they used Chinese.\u00a0 As a result, there was zero standardization, and every set of village priests had their own local dialect of the script, resulting in a huge number of characters: 90,000 by one estimate.<\/p>\n<p>Links: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yi_script\">Wikipedia<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ancientscripts.com\/yi.html\">Ancient Scripts<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/writing\/yi.htm\">Omniglot<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.babelstone.co.uk\/Yi\/script.html\">Babelstone<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evertype.com\/standards\/yy\/n1187.html\">Encoding Yi<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a very long time, the Yi people used a logographic script to write their language. Their tradition says that it was created by someone named Aki in around 700 AD, but the earliest record is from 1485 AD. Mostly &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/17\/classic-yi-700-1485-ad-china\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[8,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-logograms-language-types","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","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=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}