Walking with Mao

On October 1st 1951, Naxi scholar and general historian extraordinaire Fang Guoyu went to Beijing, as part of a delegation of ethnic minorities, to attend the second anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Fang was a representative of the Naxi minority, and on the eve of the anniversary, he presented Chairman Mao with a silk banner (锦旗), upon which the following sentence was written in the Dongba script:
ŋə˧˩ gɯ˧ zi˧ be˧ ŋʏ˧˩ gu˧˩ dʐi˧ bə˧
Pronunciation.

Let's break it down (apologies for the formatting here; but Blogspot is useless at this and I don't feel like messing around with the HTML):






ŋə˧˩ gɯ˧ "We"
The character for 'I', resembling a person pointing at themselves. The character for crack/split (resembling a crack in a piece of wood), which here is a loan character representing the Naxi plural marker.






zi˧ be˧ "Always"
The character for grass and the character for 'to do'; both loan characters that together mean 'always' in Naxi.






ŋʏ˧˩ gu˧˩ "behind you"

The character for silver, loan character for 'you', and the character for 'carry on the back', the meaning of which is extended to 'behind'.







dʐ˧ bə˧ "want to walk"
The character for 'to walk', followed by the character for 'sole of the foot', which here is a loan character for 'want to go'.

So the whole sentence should be:
"We will always walk with you" or, if you mix it round a bit, "You'll never walk alone".

Here you can see the reliance on phonetic loan characters; and of course that the verb is at the end of the sentence - like Tibetan, Naxi sentences follow the basic SOV structure.

In his dictionary, Fang says that of all the times he used the Donbga script, this occasion was the most profound.