A Survey of Practical Documents in the Naxi Dongba Script
This article examines practical (non-scriptural) documents written in Naxi Dongba pictographic script, a writing system traditionally associated almost exclusively with religious scriptures. Noting that everyday-use materials are scarce and understudied, the author, based on fieldwork in Lijiang (Nov. 1998–Feb. 1999), collected and deciphered five such texts: a medical manual, an account book, a songbook, a diary, and a document/contract. Detailed philological analysis—including character-by-character transcription and phonetic annotation, illustrated with a sample page from a Dongba medical text—shows these materials record real aspects of Naxi social life and hold significant historical value. Compared with religious scriptures, their language is closer to spoken vernacular, writing is largely word-for-word, phonetic loan characters constitute roughly 70–80%, and character variants are numerous. These findings are important for clarifying Dongba script's social functions and its developmental stage and nature.
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