Some Specific Methods for Investigating the Written Recording of Various Parts of Speech in Naxi Dongba Manuscripts
This article by Huang Sixian (Hainan Normal University) proposes concrete methods for investigating how the various parts of speech are recorded in writing across Naxi Dongba manuscripts, an early-stage field previously limited to fragmentary, syllable-focused studies. It sets out principles for selecting representative, sufficiently long, well-deciphered scriptures with multiple surviving versions (using Chongbantu, Gushiji, and Flood Stories of the Moso People as examples); building an Access-based corpus through careful segmentation of mixed mature, pictorial, and ligature-compound glyphs, structured data entry, and linkage to existing Dongba dictionaries; statistical and descriptive methods for tallying recorded versus unrecorded words and their recording modes (pictographic, ideographic, phono-semantic, phonetic-loan); and comparison of recording patterns across and within manuscripts by region, era, and scribe. The author insists language must be treated as primary and script as secondary throughout.
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