A Preliminary Study of Phonetic Loan Phenomena in Dongba Script
This article examines the phenomenon of phonetic loan characters (jiajie) in Dongba script, the pictographic writing system of the Naxi people, viewed as an intermediate stage between form-based and sound-based writing systems. Comparing Dongba script with oracle bone inscriptions, the author argues that although Dongba script is more primitive in form and appeared over 2,000 years later than oracle bone script, its use of loan characters is extremely widespread—far more so, proportionally, than previous scholars estimated. Drawing on Rock's dictionary, Li Lin-ts'an's Dongba dictionary, and classical texts such as "The Naxi Flood Story," the study shows that loan characters can account for 50-90% of characters in given texts, with even everyday words for domestic animals (unlike in oracle bone script) frequently serving as loan graphs. The author concludes that Dongba loan-character usage has stabilized into fixed borrowing patterns and is developing along two paths: toward phono-semantic compounds and toward a fully phonetic writing system.
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