Tangut

Tangut (𗼇𗟲, mji² ŋwu̲¹) was the language of the Western Xia (1038-1227), the Tangut-ruled state whose capital stood at present-day Yinchuan. It was written in a logographic script of its own invention, commissioned in 1036 and credited by the History of Song to the official Yeli Renrong: close to 6,000 characters (5,863 by a 2004 count) that echo the strokes of Chinese but are structurally independent — none of them pictographic, and only about a tenth carrying a phonetic element, against over 90% in Chinese. The state fell to the Mongols in 1227, yet the script's last dated use is a pair of dhāraṇī pillars erected at Baoding in 1502. Most of the surviving corpus was excavated at Khara-Khoto by Pyotr Kozlov in 1909 and was read with the help of the bilingual glossary Pearl in the Palm (1190) and the Tanguts' own dictionaries, the Wenhai (Sea of Characters) and the Tongyin (Homophones). The phonology is reconstructed rather than recorded, and reconstructions differ sharply; the readings shown here follow Gong Hwang-cherng's system as printed in Li Fanwen's Xia-Han dictionary (tense-vowel marks omitted), with tone 1 written ˧ and tone 2 ˧˥. Its place in Sino-Tibetan is unsettled too: long assigned to Qiangic, it is now argued to be West Gyalrongic, specifically Horpa (Lai et al. 2020; Beaudouin 2023). Only concepts attested in the Tangut corpus are filled in here.

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