Khitan small script

The Khitan small script (

History

The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela. He drew his inspiration from "the Uyghur language and script",^[1] which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was originally thought to be a daughter script of the Old Uyghur alphabet.^[2]

Description

Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, yet still "able to record any word."^[3] While small-script inscriptions employed some logograms as well, most words in small script were made using a blocked system reminiscent of the later Hangul writing of Korea, meaning that a word is represented by one group (square block) composed of several glyphs with individual phonetic meanings (somewhat similar to the jamo units of Hangul). Unlike Hangul's jamo, a Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant pair as well.^[4] Each block could incorporate two to seven such "phonetic element" characters, written in pairs within the block, with the first half of the pair on the left. If there were an odd number of characters in a block, the unpaired character would be centered below the preceding pair.

Although there is some speculation, it appears there are no characters that both the small and large scripts share. Periodically, epitaphs written using small script will be written using the large script method of

Much of this information came from the "Khitan Script Research Group", led by the Mongolian scholar named Činggeltei, who used monuments, calendar, and similar Chinese texts to decipher sections of small script.^[8] A particularly valuable object of their study was the inscription on the Da Jin huangdi dtong jinglüe langjun xingji (zh:大金皇弟都统经略郎君行记) stele, which is the only known bilingual Chinese-Khitan inscription. Produced during the Jurchen Jin dynasty it, ironically, was originally (before the discovery of other Khitan inscriptions in 1922) thought to be in Jurchen.^[9]

Corpus

There are no surviving examples of printed texts in the Khitan language, and aside from five example Khitan large characters with Chinese glosses in a book on calligraphy written by Tao Zongyi (陶宗儀) during the mid 14th century, there are no Chinese glossaries or dictionaries of Khitan.^{[citation needed]}

The main source of Khitan texts are monumental inscriptions, mostly comprising memorial tablets buried in the tombs of Khitan nobility.^[10] There are about 33 known monuments with inscriptions in the Khitan small script, ranging in date from 1053 to 1171.

Encoding

The Khitan small script was added to Unicode version 13.0 in March 2020. 470 graphic characters are located in the Khitan Small Script block, while a single invisible filler character (U+16FE4: KHITAN SMALL SCRIPT FILLER) is located in the Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation block. The filler is inserted following the first character of a cluster, and denotes a character cluster laid out with one character on the first line, as opposed to the usual two.^[11]

References