Research Progress and New Perspectives on the Linguistic Nature of Naxi Dongba Script
This article reviews research progress on the linguistic nature of the Naxi Dongba script, tracing three main stages: early studies classifying it as pictographic writing; 1980s–1990s debates comparing Dongba "phono-semantic compounds" with Chinese characters, yielding three divergent views; and recent trends toward more refined, multidisciplinary, and methodologically rigorous approaches. The authors trace the general stages of script evolution—from picture writing to pictographs, ideographs, and phonetic scripts—and situate Dongba script within this framework, noting its resemblance to primitive pictographic recording systems akin to Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, and ancient Chinese characters, while also differing in word-formation methods and image-meaning relationships. The authors propose applying psycholinguistic methods to examine whether Dongba category symbols function like Chinese semantic radicals and whether its phonetic markers resemble Chinese phonetic components, and suggest systematically comparing Dongba script cognition with picture and Chinese-character cognition to help determine its true nature.
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