A Review of "Naxi Pictographic Glossary
This review introduces the newly published "A Dictionary of Naxi Pictographs" (Yunnan People's Publishing House), a 645-page deluxe facsimile edition that sold out its 1,000-copy print run immediately. Naxi pictographic script, used by Dongba priests to record scriptures, is one of the world's few surviving living pictographic writing systems, alongside a later phonetic script; both are vital sources for studying Naxi language, history, religion, and culture. The article traces the history of compiling Naxi dictionaries: early 20th-century Dongba efforts to standardize characters, followed by works by foreign and Chinese scholars—Bacot's "Les Mo-so" (1913), Yang Zhonghong's 1931 trilingual dictionary, Li Lin-ts'an's pictographic and phonetic dictionaries (1940s), and Joseph Rock's posthumously published "Na-khi–English Encyclopedic Dictionary." Each contributed valuable but imperfect records. Fang Guoyu began researching Naxi pictographs in the 1930s, studying under Liu Bannong, Zhao Yuanren, and Li Fang-Kuei, culminating in this dictionary after roughly fifty years of work.
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