Dongba Script: The Aesthetic Characteristics of a Pictographic Writing System
Wang Yuan, Xu Xiaoli, and Zhang Xu present Dongba script as the world's sole surviving "living" pictographic script, more primitive in form than oracle-bone script, cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Maya glyphs. Illustrated with photographs of manuscripts, artifacts, and practicing Dongba priests, the article analyzes three aesthetic dimensions: the primitive beauty of its pictorial method of conveying meaning, rooted in Dongba religious scripture; the pictorial, image-based beauty of its compound-ideographic characters (contrasted with the Chinese characters for "love," "I," and "sunset"); and the poetic, image-text unity created by its inexact, non-one-to-one correspondence between characters and spoken words, which lets a handful of symbols evoke an entire passage of narrative.
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