meat + fire = broil/roast

Fresh from the Naxiology desk, comes the latest "interesting similarities between the Chinese and Dongba scripts" post.

Time for another ideogrammic compound - this time its meat + fire. Which, in Chinese, gives us 炙 zhi, and in Dongba we get bʏ˧ (Dongba on the left!).

Here we can again see the slightly more explicit, less stylised "pictographic" Dongba character, but the elements in the Chinese character are easily identifiable too.

The Dongba character is a little more complex, but (I think) easier to remember - and you can almost smell that meat!

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.

On language and forested mountains

I've been formally learning the Dongba script for about a month now; and it's been well worth the effort. It is, like Chinese, a very different language to anything I was previously familiar with, and it's full of unique words and expressions.

While it's probably useless economically, and in a corporate environment (why does the very word corporate send shivers down my spine?), it's useful in that it provides a perspective on the development of Chinese, and it has value as a tool for comparative research into oracle bone script.
One of the things that Li laoshi has been stressing is an understanding of Xu Shen's 六书 (the six categories of Chinese character classification) when analysing Dongba characters, so I can thank Dr Fuerher for having prepared me with the basics back on my MA course.

Language is very much informed by local geography. like the common cliched half-truth that Eskimos have loads of words for 'snow', the Dongba script and Naxi has lots of words for mountains. One of these words is a particular favourite: a mountain covered in trees.

The pronunciation is: sər˧ dzi˧˩ dʑy˧˩ ʂər˥ (repeated)

I love this character because it encapsulates why I dislike hiking in certain parts of China - especially Zhejiang (I'm only singling out Zhejiang because I used to live there). This is because the mountains are covered in trees, so much so that no sane person would ever think that a ramble to the top would be a fun or interesting thing to do. What are you going to do when you reach the summit? Admire the trees? And what exactly are you going to do about those nasty snake and insect bites that you collected scrambling through all that foliage? No, densely forested mountains do not a happy rambler make.

Photo: a mountain in Anji, Zhejiang.

Heaven and earth

Lesson one from Popular Dongba Script 通俗东巴文. This textbook is apparently the book that kids use when learning Naxi and Dongba script as an extra-curricular class in Lijiang. Naturally, it's not a popular class - but hey, if nobody learns it, then it's gone for good...

Have a listen (the first three characters that make up the title are not read out).

It's a short reading from a Dongba scripture: Heaven and earth. Written from left to right.

The translation should go something like this:

"In the high heavens, the stars appear;
the stars shine bright today.
On the broad earth, the grass grows;
the grass is green today."

Even in the Dongba script, sun+moon = bright!

The Dongba character for bright, bu˧, is another ideogrammic compound, composed of the characters for sun and moon, both emitting light.

This is if course, almost identical to the Chinese 明, with the sun on the left and the moon on the right, only in the Chinese there is no pictorial representation of the rays of light. Here they are together (Dongba on the left!):

You'll notice the positoning of the 'ideogrammic' elements is also near identical. No one really knows how old the Dongba script is, but it's definitely more recent than the Chinese script, and this seems to be another example of the latter's influence on the former.