Tangut (also
Xixia or
Hsi-Hsia) is an ancient northeastern Tibeto-Burman language once spoken in the Tangut Empire, also known as Western Xia dynasty. By some linguists it is classified as one of the
Qiangic languagesQiangic or Kiangic, formerly known as Dzorgai, is a language group of the northeastern Tibeto-Burman of Sino-Tibetan language famlily, spoken mainly in Southwestern China, including Sichuan, Tibet, and Yunnan....
, among which one also finds Qiang and rGyalrong. It is distantly related to
TibetanThe Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering South Asia, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh, Nepal,...
and
BurmeseThe Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most continue to refer to the language as Burmese. It is the native language of the Bamar and other related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar...
, and possibly also to
ChineseChinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
.
Tangut was the official language of the Tangut empire (known in Tibetan as Mi-nyag and in Chinese as Xi Xia 西夏), inhabited by the
Tangut peopleThe Tangut identified with the state of Western Xia were traditionally thought of as a Qiangic-speaking people who moved to northwestern China sometime before the 10th century AD. Recent research indicated that the term “Tangut” most likely represented the “Donghu people;” “-t” in Mongolian...
, which obtained its independence from the Chinese
SongA song is a metrical composition intended or adapted for singing, especially one in rhymed stanzas; a lyric; a ballad....
dynasty at the beginning of the 11th century. Tangut Empire was annihilated when
Genghis KhanGenghis Khan , ; 1162–1227), born , was the founder, Khan and Khagan of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in history....
invaded in 1226.
The Tangut language has its own script, namely the
Tangut scriptThe Tangut script was a logographic writing system, used for writing the equally obsolete Tangut language of the Western Xia Dynasty. According to the latest count, there are 5863 Tangut characters excluding variants...
. Occasionally, for religious documents, the Tangut language was written in
Tibetan scriptThe Tibetan script is an abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Denzongkha, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language. The printed form of the script is called uchen script while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday writing is...
.
Rediscovery
The latest text (inscription of Buddhist
dharaniA ' is a type of ritual speech similar to a mantra. The terms dharani and satheesh may even be seen as synonyms, although they are normally used in distinct contexts....
) that can be found written in the Tangut language dates to 1502, which means that the language was still in use three hundred years after the annihilation of the Tangut Empire.
The majority of extant Tangut texts were excavated at
Khara-KhotoKhara-Khoto is a medieval Tangut city in the Ejin khoshuu of Alxa League, in western Inner Mongolia, near the former Gashun Lake...
in 1909 by Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov, and these documents are at present preserved in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in
Saint PetersburgSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city's other names were Petrograd and Leningrad...
. These fortunately survived the
Siege of LeningradThe Siege of Leningrad, also known as The Leningrad Blockade was an unsuccessful military operation by the Axis powers to capture Leningrad during World War II. The siege started at 8 September 1941, when the last land connection to the city was severed...
, but a number of manuscripts in the possession of
NevskyNikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky was a Russian and Soviet linguist, an expert on a number of East Asian languages...
at the time of his arrest by the
NKVDThe People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including...
in 1937 went missing, and were only returned, under mysterious circumstances, to the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in October 1991. The collections amount to about 10,000 volumes, of mostly Buddhist texts, law codes and legal documents dating from mid-11th up to early 13th centuries. Among the Buddhist texts a number of unique compilations, not known either in Chinese or in Tibetan versions, were recently discovered. Furthermore, the Buddhist canon, the Confucian classics, and a great number of indigenous texts written in Tangut have been preserved. These other major Tangut collections, though much smaller in size, belong to the
British MuseumThe British Museum is a museum of human history and culture situated in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from...
, National Library in Beijing, Library of Beijing University and other libraries.
The research of Tangut script began in the early 20th century when G. Morisse first acquired a copy of the Tangut
Lotus SutraThe Lotus Sutra or Sutra on the White Lotus of the Sublime Dharma is one of the most popular and influential Mahayana sutras in Asia, and the basis on which the Tien Tai and Nichiren sects of Buddhism were established.-History and background:The Lotus Sutra was probably compiled...
, which was partially researched by some unknown Chinese scholar. After the discovery of the Khara-Khoto library by P. K. Kozlov, the script was identified as that of the Tangut state of Xixia, and actual research began. Such scholars as Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, Ishihama Juntaro (石濱純太郎),
Berthold LauferBerthold Laufer was a German-American anthropologist, orientalist.Born in Cologne to a Jewish family, Laufer attended the Friedrich Wilhelms Gymnasium from 1884-1893. He continued his studies in Berlin and completed his doctorate degree at the University of Leipzig in 1897...
, Luo Fuchang (羅福萇), Luo Fucheng (羅福成), and Wang Jingru (王靜如) have contributed to research on the Tangut language. The most significant contribution was made by the Russian scholar N. A. Nevskij (1892-1937), who compiled the first Tangut Dictionary and reconstructed the meaning of a number of Tangut grammatical particles, thus making it possible to actually read and understand Tangut texts. His scholarly achievements were published in 1960 under the title "Tangutskaya Filologiya" (Tangut Philology) and the scholar was eventually awarded the Soviet Lenin State Prize for his work. The understanding of the Tangut language is far from perfect: although certain issues of morphology (Ksenia Kepping, "The Morphology of the Tangut Language", Moscow: Nauka, 1985) and grammar (
Nishida TatsuoNishida Tatsuo ,is a professor emeritus at Kyoto university. His work encompassed research on a variety of Tibeto-Burman languages, in particular he made great contributions to the deciphering of the Tangut Language....
, "Seika go no kenkyū", etc) have been resolved, the syntax structure of Tangut remains largely unexplored.
Reconstruction
The connection between the writing and the pronunciation of the Tangut language is even more tenuous than that between Chinese writing and the modern Chinese languages. Thus although in Chinese more than 90% of the characters possess a phonetic element, this proportion is limited to about 10% in Tangut according to Sofronov. The reconstruction of Tangut pronunciation must resort to other sources.
The discovery of the
Fanhan heshi zhangzhongzhu (Chinese: 番漢合時掌中珠 "Tangut-Chinese timely handy pearl"), a Tangut-Chinese bilingual glossary, permitted Ivanov (1909) and Laufer (1916) to propose initial reconstructions and to undertake the comparative study of Tangut. This glossary in effect indicates the pronunciation of each Tangut character with one or several Chinese characters, and inversely each Chinese character with one or more Tangut characters. The second source is the corpus of Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut. These data were studied for the first time by Nevsky (Nevskij) (1925).
Nonetheless, these two sources were not in themselves sufficient for a systematic reconstruction of Tangut. In effect, these transcriptions were not written with the intention of representing with precision the pronunciation of Tangut, but instead simply to help foreigners to pronounce and memorize the words of one language with the words of another which they could understand.
The third source, which constitutes the basis of the modern reconstructions, consists of monolingual Tangut dictionaries: the
Wenhai (文海), two editions of the
Tongyin (同音), the
Wenhai zalei (文海雜類) and an untitled dictionary. The record of the pronunciation in these dictionaries is made using the principle of
fanqieIn Chinese phonology, fanqie is a method to indicate the pronunciation of a character by using two other characters.-The Origin:...
, borrowed from the Chinese lexicographic tradition. Although these dictionaries may differ on small details (e.g. the
Tongyin categorizes the characters according to syllable initial and
rimeIn the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...
without taking any account of tone), they all adopt the same system of 105 rimes. A certain number of rimes are in complementary distribution with respect to the place of articulation of the initials, e.g. rimes 10 and 11 or rimes 36 and 37, which shows that the scholars who composed these dictionaries had made a very precise phonological analysis of their language.
In distinction to the transcription in foreign languages, the Tangut
fanqie makes distinctions among the rhymes in a systematic and very precise manner. Due to the
fanqie, we now have a good understanding of the phonological categories of the language. Nonetheless, it is necessary to compare the phonological system of the dictionaries with the other sources in order to "fill in" the categories with a phonetic value.
N. A. Nevsky reconstructed Tangut grammar and provided the first Tangut-Chinese-English-Russian dictionary, which together with the collection of his papers was published posthumously in 1960 under the title "Tangut Philology" (Moscow: 1960). Later, substantial contribution to the research of Tangut language was done by
Nishida TatsuoNishida Tatsuo ,is a professor emeritus at Kyoto university. His work encompassed research on a variety of Tibeto-Burman languages, in particular he made great contributions to the deciphering of the Tangut Language....
(西田龍雄), K.B. Kepping,
Gong Hwang cherngGong Hwang cherng is a research fellow at Academia Sinica. He earned his PhD in 1975 from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research focuses on Sino-Tibetan linguistics in particular on Tangut and Old Chinese.-Works:...
(龔煌城), M.V. Sofronov and
Li FanwenLi Fanwen is a Chinese linguist and Tangutologist.-Biography:Li Fanwen was born in Xixiang County, Shaanxi. After leaving school, he worked for several years before going to Beijing to study Tibetan at the Central College for Nationalities, from which he graduated in 1956...
(李範文). There are four Tangut dictionaries available: the one composed by N.A. Nevsky, one composed by Nishida (1966), one composed by Li Fanwen (1997, revised edition 2008) and one composed by
E.I. KychanovEvgenij Ivanovich Kychanov is a Soviet and Russian orientalist, an expert on the Tangut people and their mediaeval Xi Xia Empire...
(2006).
There is growing a school of Tangut studies in China. Leading scholars include Shi Jinbo (史金波), Li Fanwen, Nie Hongyin (聶鴻音), Bai Bin (白濱) in mainland China, and Gong Hwang-cherng and Lin Yingjin (林英津) in Taiwan. In other countries, leading scholars in the field include E. I. Kychanov and his student K. J. Solonin in Russia, Nishida Tatsuo and Arakawa Shintaro (荒川慎太郎) in Japan, and Ruth W. Dunnell in the USA.
Phonology
The Tangut syllable has a CVC structure and carries one of two distinctive tones, flat or rising. Following the tradition of Chinese phonological analysis the Tangut syllable is divided into initial (声母) and rhyme (韻母) (i.e. the remaining syllable minus the initial).
Consonants
The consonants are divided into the following categories.
| Chinese Term |
Translation |
Modern Term |
Arakawa |
Gong |
| 重唇音類 |
heavy lip |
bilabials |
p, ph, b, m |
p, ph, b, m |
| 軽唇音類 |
light lip |
labio-dentals |
f, v, w |
|
| 舌頭音類 |
tongue tip |
dentals |
t, th, d, n |
t, th, d, n |
| 舌上音類 |
upper tongue |
|
ty', thy', dy', ny' |
|
| 牙音類 |
ga-like |
velars |
k, kh, g, ng |
k, kh, g, ŋ |
| 歯頭音類 |
tooth tip |
dental affricates and fricatives |
ts, tsh, dz, s |
ts, tsh, dz, s |
| 正歯音類 |
true tooth |
palatal affricates and fricatives |
c, ch, j, sh |
tɕ, tɕh, dʑ, ɕ |
| 候音類 |
|
laryngeals |
', h |
., x, ɣ |
| 流風音類 |
flowing air |
resonants |
l, lh, ld, z, r, zz |
l, lh, z, r, ʑ |
The rhyme books distinguish 105 rhyme classes. These are in turn are classified in several ways, by grade (等), type (環), and class (摂).
Tangut rhymes occur in three types (環). These are seen in the tradition of Nishida, followed by both Arakawa and Gong as 'normal' 普通母音, 'tense'緊候母音, and 'retroflex' 捲舌母音. Gong leaves normal vowels unmarked, places a dot under tense vowels, and an -r after retroflex vowels. Arakawa differs only by indicating tense vowels with a final -q.
The rhyme books distinguish four vowel grades (等). In early phonetic reconstructions all four were separately accounted for, but it has since been realized that grades three and four are in complementary distribution depending on the initial. Consequently the reconstructions of Arakawa and Gong do not account for this distinction. Gong represents these three grades as V, iV, and jV. Arakawa accounts for them as V, iV, and V:.
In general rhyme class (摂), corresponds to the set of all rhymes under the same rhyme type which have the same main vowel.
Gong further posits phonemic vowel length. The evidence he points to indicates that Tangut had a distinction that Chinese lacked, but does not include positive evidence that this distinction was vowel length. Consequently other researchers have remained skeptical.
Vowels
|
普通母音 |
緊候母音 |
捲舌母音 |
| close |
i I u |
iq eq uq |
ir Ir ur |
| mid |
e o |
eq2 oq |
er or |
| open |
a |
aq |
ar |
External links
Ксения Кепинг. Последние статьи и документы. (Ksenia Kepping. Last Works and Documents.) Guillaume Jacques,
Tangoute 西夏に関するページ