Figure 2 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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Ruke Naxi Syllabary by Dongba Shi Maning. The left image (a) is the first page of the note and the right image (b) is the second page.
Source publication
Dongba script is one of the very few pictographic writing systems still surviving in the world. The script evolved over time, and this is reflected by the correspondence between its written symbols and the related spoken language. During my fieldwork, I witnessed occasionally when Dongba glyphs have been analysed to write down IPA symbols based on...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... the fieldwork, Dongba Shi Maning was also interested in IPA and wrote a chart of syllabary of Ruke Naxi through Dongba glyphs (Figure 2). There are 88 syllables, in that note, with distinctions between velar and uvular initials, alveolar and retroflexive initials, and without distinctions between alveolar nasal and alveolo-palatal nasal, without distinctions of tones among the syllables. ...
Similar publications
This study is the first to report chronometric evidence on Tongan language production. It has been speculated that the mora plays an important role during Tongan phonological encoding. A mora follows the (C)V form, so /a/ and /ka/ (but not /k/) denote a mora in Tongan. Using a picture-word naming paradigm, Tongan native speakers named pictures cont...
Citations
... Conversely, Dongba script is an efficient tool for Dongba priests to mark phonetic value. Two learning notes of IPA are interpreted in Xu (2022). The two notes were compiled by Ruke Dongba priests during their field work interviews at Tsinghua University in 2011. ...
This paper documents and analyzes several Dongba script notes collected during my interviews with the Ruke Dongba priests. It provides an overview of Ruke Dongba glyphs in processing daily vocabulary and the International Phonetic Alphabet. It compares these Dongba pictographs with the Geba script, the syllabic writing system of Naxi people, as well as the various types of scripts used by some other ethnic groups, which show a general tendency of Romanization in the generation of alphabetic writing systems and provides a pattern inherent in the historical evolution of writing. IPA symbols, a fundamental tool of field linguists, facilitate learners in grasping a language and nonalphabetic scripts. In addition to analyzing the Ruke Dongba pictographs attested in the secular manuscripts in the context of history of writing, this study contributes to the linguistic description of Ruke Dongba culture and the diversity of Dongba tradition.
