Chapter 34 Chapter 9 The Two-Way Influence of Chinese Characters and Other Nationalities and National Scripts

Khitan is a nomadic people in ancient northern my country.As early as the history of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, "Wei Shu" has records.At the end of the Tang Dynasty, Yelu Abaoji, the leader of the Khitan, unified the various tribes and established the Khitan ("Liao") Dynasty, which did not perish until the end of the Northern Song Dynasty. After the establishment of the Khitan Dynasty, two different types of characters were created with reference to Chinese characters: Khitan large characters and Khitan small characters, and were used to write and translate many works.Unfortunately, these books have been lost.

Later, the Jurchen (namely "Jin") on the border with Khitan rose and created the Jurchen script.Jurchen characters were created under the direct influence of Khitan characters and the indirect influence of Chinese characters. The following is a comparison of some Khitan characters, Jurchen characters and Chinese characters to see: In the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, a feudal dynasty established with the Dangxiang clan as the main body rose in the northwest of my country and Gansu, called "Xixia", which existed for nearly 200 years.Xixia also imitated Chinese characters and created Xixia characters, with about 6,000 characters.Its shape and outline are basically square, and it is also composed of basic strokes of Chinese characters such as dot, horizontal, vertical, left, and right, and there are even differences in similar Chinese character fonts such as regular script, running script, cursive script, and seal script.Many of the character-building methods of Xixia script are the same as those of the Chinese character "Six Books".

At that time, some people compiled various types of Xixia dictionaries, including "Wen Hai", "Yin Tong", "Pan Han Heshi Palm Zhongzhu", etc., which have become important materials for the study of Xixia characters today. The Xixia Dynasty was later destroyed by the Mongols, and the Xixia characters were gradually lost. The Mongols who established the Yuan Dynasty used the homophones of Chinese characters plus some special marks to record their own language before creating their own characters.They have a great 12-volume work "The Secret History of Mongolia", which was written in this way.Later, they had their own characters - Basiba characters.

The Zhuang people, who mainly live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of my country today, used a kind of writing called "square Zhuang characters" for a long time before adopting the alphabetic writing based on the Latin alphabet.This kind of "square Zhuang characters" is also modeled after Chinese characters, most of which are phonetic characters, such as "妑" from "女", indicating that this character means "woman"; using "Ba" as a phonetic symbol, indicating that this character The pronunciation in Zhuang language is similar to "Ba". The word "汏" comes from "shui", which means "river"; "big" is used as a phonetic symbol to indicate its pronunciation.

Most are distributed in Guangxi, and a few are in Guangdong, Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan and other places, where they live together with the Han, Zhuang, and Miao nationalities.Since the Zhenguan period in the early Tang Dynasty (627-649 A.D.), a Chinese-style Yao language has been circulating among the people, which is similar in shape to Zhuang characters, and is used to record the legends and songs of the nation.Because the Yao people lived scattered, this kind of writing gradually died out later. Distributed in Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hainan and other places.Historically, Chinese-style Hmong characters have been used. Some scholars call them "square Miao characters."There are still three specimens of this kind of writing: Bantang Miao characters, Laozhai Miao characters, and Guwen Miao characters.

In ancient times, there was the name of "thorn man". In history, "Nanzhao Kingdom" and "Dali Kingdom" were established. After the Ming Dynasty, it was also called "Minjia", and it mainly lived in Dali, Yunnan.Since the Nanzhao era in the 8th century AD, the Bai people have created their own Chinese-style writing, called "white characters" or "white text".There are quite a few steles inscribed with white characters in the Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, and they still exist today.The shape of white characters is easier to recognize, such as "(mountain fan)" for mountains, "(upper river and lower water)" for rivers, and "(氵氵隹)" for water, etc.

The Shui people who are distributed in some areas of Guizhou Province in my country today used Chinese characters as references before 1949. They have a form similar to Chinese characters written backwards and backwards, which is called "Shui Shu" or "Fan Shu".However, it has already switched to phonetic writing.