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| Tangut script 𗼇𘝞 | |
|---|---|
 The Art of War written in Tangut | |
| Script type | Logographic |
| Creator | Yeli Renrong |
Period | 1036–1502 |
| Direction | Vertical right-to-left (Modern academia: left-to-right) |
| Languages | Tangut language |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Tang(520), Tangut |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Tangut |
| |
| Chinese | 西夏文 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Literal meaning | Western Xia script | ||||||
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TheTangut script is alogographic writing system, formerly used for writing the extinctTangut language of theTanguts. It was widely used during the Tangut-foundedWestern Xia dynasty, and fell into obscurity after its extinction. According to a 2004 count, 5,863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants.[1] The Tangut characters are similar in appearance toChinese characters,[2] with the same type ofstrokes, but the methods of forming characters in the Tangut writing system are significantly different fromthose of forming Chinese characters. As withChinese, regular,running,cursive andseal scripts were used in Tangut writing.
According to theHistory of Song (1346), the script was designed by the high-ranking officialYeli Renrong in 1036.[3][4] The script was invented in a short period of time, and was put into use quickly. Government schools were founded to teach the script. Official documents were written in the script (with diplomatic ones written bilingually). A great number ofBuddhist scriptures were translated from Tibetan and Chinese, andblock printed in the script.[5] Although the dynasty collapsed in 1227, the script continued to be used for another few centuries. The last known example of the script occurs on a pair ofTangut dharani pillars found atBaoding in present-dayHebei province, which were erected in 1502.[6]
[Tangut] is remarkable for being written in one of the most inconvenient of all scripts, a collection of nearly 5,800 characters of the same kind as Chinese characters but rather more complicated; very few are made up of as few as four strokes and most are made up of a good many more, in some cases nearly twenty... There are few recognizable indications of sound and meaning in the constituent parts of a character, and in some cases characters which differ from one another only in minor details of shape or by one or two strokes have completely different sounds and meanings.[7]
Tangut characters can be divided into two classes: simple and composite. The latter are much more numerous. The simple characters can be either semantic or phonetic. None of the Tangut characters are pictographic, while the Chinese characters were at the time of their creation; this is one of the major differences between Tangut and Chinese characters.
Most composite characters comprise two components. A few comprise three or four. A component can be a simple character, or part of a composite character. The composite characters include semantic-semantic ones and semantic-phonetic ones. A few special composite characters were made fortransliterating Chinese andSanskrit.
There are a number of pairs of special composite characters worth noting. The members of such a pair have the same components, only the location of the components in them is different (e.g. AB vs. BA, ABC vs. ACB). The members of such a pair have very similar meanings.
The Sea of Characters (Tangut:𘝞𗗚;Chinese:文海;pinyin:wén hǎi), a 12th century monolingual Tangut rhyming dictionary, analyzes what other characters each character is derived from. Its analyses illustrate another difference between Tangut and Chinese characters. In Chinese, typically, each semantic component has its own meaning, and each phonetic component its own sound; they contribute this meaning or sound to any complex character they appear in. By contrast, in theSea of Characters analysis of Tangut, a component contributes the meaning or sound of some other character that contains it, potentially a different one in every appearance. For example, the component𘤊 can have the meaning of "bird" (𗿼 *dźjwow, of which it is the left side), as in𗿝 *dze "wild goose"=𗿼 *dźjwow "bird"+𗨜 *dze "longevity". But the same component is also used to convey meanings of bone, smoke, food, and time, among others.[8]
Some components take different shape depending on what part of the character they appear in (e.g., left side, right side, middle, bottom).[8]
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6,125 characters of the Tangut script were included in Unicode version 9.0 in June 2016 in theTangut block. 755 Radicals and components used in the modern study of Tangut were added to theTangut Components block. An iteration mark,U+16FE0 𖿠TANGUT ITERATION MARK, was included in theIdeographic Symbols and Punctuation block.[9] Five additional characters were added in June 2018 with the release of Unicode version 11.0. Six additional characters were added in March 2019 with the release of Unicode version 12.0. A further nine Tangut ideographs were added to theTangut Supplement block and 13 Tangut components were added to the Tangut Components block in March 2020 with the release of Unicode version 13.0. The Tangut Supplement block size was changed in Unicode version 14.0 to correct the erroneous block end point (version 13:18D8F → version 14.0:18D7F).[10] Additional components were added with theTangut Components Supplement block in September 2025 with the release of Unicode version 17.0.
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