Tangut language
| Tangut | |
|---|---|
| Xi-Xia | |
| 西夏文 | |
Buddhist scripture written in Tangut
|
|
| Native to | Western Xia |
| Ethnicity | Tangut people |
| Era | attested 1036–1502 AD |
|
Sino-Tibetan
|
|
| Tangut script | |
| Official status | |
|
Official language in
|
Western Xia |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
txg |
| Glottolog | tang1334 |
Tangut (also Xīxià or Hsi-Hsia or Mi-nia) is an ancient northeastern Tibeto-Burman language once spoken in the Western Xia, also known as the Tangut Empire. It is classified by some linguists as a Qiangic language, which includes the Northern and Southern Qiang languages and the Rgyalrong languages, among others.
Tangut was one of the official languages of the Western Xia (known in Tibetan as Mi nyag and in Chinese as 彌藥 Míyào), which was founded by the Tangut people and obtained its independence from the Song dynasty at the beginning of the 11th century. The Western Xia were annihilated when Genghis Khan invaded in 1226.
The Tangut language has its own script, the Tangut script.
The latest known text written in the Tangut language, the Tangut dharani pillars, dates to 1502, suggesting that the language was still in use nearly three hundred years after the destruction of the Tangut Empire.
Modern research into the Tangut languages began in the early 20th century when G. Morisse first acquired a copy of the Tangut Lotus Sutra, which had been partially investigated by some unknown Chinese scholar. The majority of extant Tangut texts were excavated at Khara-Khoto in 1909 by Pyotr Kozlov, and the script was identified as that of the Tangut state of Xixia. Such scholars as Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, Ishihama Juntaro (石濱純太郎), Berthold Laufer, Luo Fuchang (羅福萇), Luo Fucheng (羅福成), and Wang Jingru (王靜如) have contributed to research on the Tangut language. The most significant contribution was made by the Russian scholar Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky (1892–1937), who compiled the first Tangut Dictionary and reconstructed the meaning of a number of Tangut grammatical particles, thus making it possible to actually read and understand Tangut texts. His scholarly achievements were published posthumously in 1960 under the title "Tangutskaya Filologiya" (Tangut Philology) and the scholar was eventually (and posthumously) awarded the Soviet Lenin Prize for his work. The understanding of the Tangut language is far from perfect: Although certain aspects of the morphology (Ksenia Kepping, The Morphology of the Tangut Language, Moscow: Nauka, 1985) and grammar (Tatsuo Nishida, Seika go no kenkyū, etc.) are understood, the syntactic structure of Tangut remains largely unexplored.
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Wikipedia