A Comparative Study of Form and Meaning in Yi Script and Dongba Script
Zhu Wenxu compares the origins and structural formation of Yi script and Dongba script, the only two Chinese minority scripts independently created by their own peoples rather than imported or adapted from Chinese characters. The paper reviews competing legends and theories about each script's creation and dating (Yi script placed roughly at the Qin-Han period, Dongba script roughly late Tang to Song), then compares their formal typologies -- pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic-loan elements -- and specific character constructions across categories such as birds, trees, water, and body parts, alongside parallel Chinese examples. It highlights structural principles shared across all three scripts (forming characters around a category's single defining feature) and key differences, such as Yi script's "reorientation" phenomenon and each script's differing treatment of the human figure, concluding that every script encodes its own people's worldview while sharing humanity's common early strategies for representing the world in writing.
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