{"id":350,"date":"2011-03-22T20:12:12","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T03:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=350"},"modified":"2011-04-02T22:21:49","modified_gmt":"2011-04-03T05:21:49","slug":"naxi-dongba-600ad-s-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/22\/naxi-dongba-600ad-s-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Naxi Dongba — 600AD? S. China"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Naxi Dongba excerpt<\/p><\/div>\n

Much like Aztec<\/a> and Mixtec<\/a>, Naxi Dongba is a highly pictographic communication system.\u00a0 Like Aztec and Mixtec, it’s almost not a writing system.\u00a0 If you look at a picture of the writing<\/a>, it looks more like what we think of as “drawings” than as “writing”.<\/p>\n

Indeed, this writing system is used less for communicating with other people and more with communicating to oneself<\/em> and to the gods: it is mostly used as a mnemonic system by priests, and the edges of the book are burned as part of ceremonies.\u00a0 It is highly logographic (though the logograms are wildly idiosyncratic), with pictorial rebuses for words that don’t have a logogram.<\/p>\n

After the revolution in China and then the Cultural revolution, Naxi Dongba nearly became extinct.\u00a0 The largest collections of Naxi Dongba manuscripts are those that had already left the country.\u00a0 It is still highly threatened.<\/p>\n

Naxi Dongba, like Aztec and Mixtec, raises a\u00a0 question of “What is a writing system?”\u00a0 Today’s Wikipedia article on Writing Systems<\/a> says “A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.”\u00a0 But how much abstraction into symbols is required before it moves from drawing to writing?\u00a0 Does Naxi Dongba qualify?\u00a0 Do Renaissance religious paintings qualify?\u00a0 I do not know the answers.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a>, Naxi Pictographic and Syllabographic Scripts<\/a>, Sinoglot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much like Aztec and Mixtec, Naxi Dongba is a highly pictographic communication system.\u00a0 Like Aztec and Mixtec, it’s almost not a writing system.\u00a0 If you look at a picture of the writing, it looks more like what we think of … 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":[8,16,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-logograms-language-types","category-now-ceremonial","category-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","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=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}