The Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut (Hsi-hsia) ideograms

© George van Driem and Ksenia Borisovna Kepping, 1991

Tangut is the extinct Tibeto-Burman language of the Buddhist empire of Xixià, which was destroyed in 1227 by Genghis Khan. The Tangut had a literary tradition of translated Buddhist texts and original secular works written in their own indigenous ideogrammatic script. A sound reconstruction of Tangut phonology is of major interest to the historical comparative study of Tibeto-Burman. The internal sources for the reconstruction of Tangut phonology, described in detail in a previous article (van Driem 1991c), enable scholars to establish the system of Tangut initials and rimes, but not to determine their actual pronunciation. The external sources for the reconstruction of Tangut phonology are the Chinese, Tibetan and Sankskrit transcriptions of Tangut ideograms. Tangut phonetic reconstructions have been written by Nishida Tatsuo (1966), Mikhail Viktorovitsch Sofronov (1968) and Li Fànwén (1986), but these reconstructions do not concur. The authors here report on their work with the manuscripts containing Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut ideograms. These interlinear transcriptions in Tibetan script were an attempt to represent Tangut speech sounds by means of an alphabetic writing system. The Tibetan transcriptions were probably added for didactic purposes by lamas who did not know Tangut script. The authors investigated 24 fragments of Tangut texts with Tibetan transcriptions and have compiled an exhaustive catalogue of all extant Tibetan transcriptions. Here the authors provide a physical description of the materials, an account of the history of the materials from their discovery to their present state, and a summary of previous scholarship on the topic. The authors stress the importance of bringing the insights of modern articulatory and acoustic phonetics and the historical phonology of Tibetan dialects to bear on the evalution and interpretation of the interlinear Tibetan transcriptions. The authors describe the contents of their forthcoming monograph.

[This article is an English translation by George van Driem of the authors’ article ‘Tibetskie transkripcii tangutskix ieroglifov’, which was slated for publication in Pis’mennye Pamjatniki i Problemy Istorii Kul’tury Narodov Vostoka, vypusk XXV (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Nauka’). Due to Russia’s transition to a market economy and resulting liquidity problems, it has become increasingly unlikely that the original Russian version of the article will ever be published because even the series in which it was to appear was discontinued for lack of funds after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The account of the rediscovery of lost Tangut manuscripts (van Driem 1993e) is a sequel to the present article.]