Kitan script
The two Chitan scripts were used from the 10th to the 12th centuries. It was created by the Chitan people, who spoke a Mongolian language, conquered part of what is now China , and founded the Liao Dynasty in 907 . The J̌určen people, who defeated the Chitan in 1125 and founded the Jin Dynasty , continued to use the Chitan scripts even after two J eigeneurčen scripts were created in 1119 and 1138. The latest surviving inscription dates from 1170. It was not until 1191/1192 that the Chitan script was abolished by the Jin Emperor Zhangzhong.
Decipherment
The Chitan scripts have largely not been deciphered to this day. They have come down to us in around forty grave inscriptions from the 11th century.
The official history of the Liao Dynasty (《遼 史》) was completed more than two hundred years after the fall of the dynasty. It describes the existence of two Chitan scripts - a large and a small script - and contains a glossary of about two hundred alleged Chitan words in Chinese transcription , about half of which are place names and personal names. Many of the other words stand for official titles. The Chinese transcriptions are very imprecise, and many of the purported chitan words have been identified by researchers as J̌určen rather than chitan.
After the language and scripts of the Chitan died out, it was not until 1962 that Jin Guangping again made a clear distinction between the large Chitan script and the small Chitan script. Both are barely deciphered.
Big font
The large Chitan script was created in 920 on the orders of Yelü Abaoji and is a logographic script: Each character initially stands for a word, but according to the rebus principle, its phonetic value can also be used for other words. The character 囯 stands for the word * gur "State" or for the syllable * gur in other words. Sometimes several characters can be grouped into one word.
There are several thousand different characters. They are similar in shape to Chinese characters and are formed according to the same principles, but neither their phonetic nor their semantic value corresponds to Chinese models, so that each character has to be identified individually in order to decipher.
To date, about 188 characters have been deciphered, which stand for Chinese nobility and official titles, as well as about 193 characters for Chitan words.
Small writing
The Small Chitan Script was probably created in 925. The oldest surviving inscription dates from 1053.
The small font consists of about 378 different characters and eluded all attempts at deciphering for even longer than the large font. The font was apparently not strictly standardized, and around 70 characters may just be spelling variants. The greatest advances in deciphering were made by research groups under Chinggeltei in Hohhot and under Liu Fengzhu and Yu Baolin in Beijing. In 2002 they published a list of 378 different characters, about half of which could be assigned a sound value.
The functioning of the small chitan script is by no means clear. Probably some characters represent consonants , some represent vowels, and some represent syllables . The script was used for both the Chitan language and Chinese. Some characters were only used for chitan, others only for Chinese words, and some for words from both languages.
literature
- Daniel Kane: The Kitan language and script ( Handbuch der Orientalistik / Department 8; Vol. 19). Brill, Leiden 2009, ISBN 978-90-04-16829-9 .
- 清 格爾泰 ： 《丹 小字 釋讀 問題》. Tokyo: 東京 外國語 大學 國立 亞非 語言 文化 研究所, 2002.