Maruhi Academy: Tangut Script

Hello Children. Once upon a time there was this kingdom in the middle of China called Tangut/ Xi Xia and they had a dank script that looked demonic.
To make a long story short it's extinct. Today we're going to try to study it cause I thought it'd be fun to dissect it :)

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this is Toppogi Lanji Lesson, consider checking him out :)

This is my Bluesky, consider checking this out :)

if you have good ideas for videos I'll genuinely consider them in the comments
Shout out to my boi Designor Hawt Dawg for supplying me with Mountain Dew Baja Blast for the past week he still owes me like 20 bucks tho

K bye :)

[Toppogi-kanji]

Thanks for letting me appear in your video!
I hope everyone will be interested in Tangut!

[alexrator]

I finally understand how it's like for foreigners to read chinese

[georgedeng]

I find the Tangut, Khitan and Jurchen scripts all extremely fascinating; they're like alternate Chinese characters.

[Panatesu]

As a person who translates Tangut and does research on it and closely related living languages (Horpic and other Gyalrongic), I am happy that Tangut language and script are gaining traction on media platforms. I would also mention the widely used cursive Tangut script, which makes it even more hellish...

There is also a pretty cool method of making the Tangut glyphs which I call "sino-phonograms". It's basically phonetic elements which have their values only if you translate them into the Northwestern Chinese of the time. For example, 𘕱 ɕù (toponym) has the element 𘕰 pʰùʶ "tree", but it acts as the phonetic only if you translate it into Chinese 樹 ʂy "tree". There are tons of such glyphs.

Also, a little nitpick: Tangut is not polysynthetic ulike East Gyalrongic languages and Khroskyabsic languages (the West Gyalrongic branch). Tangut and other Horpic (also West Gyalrongic) have much less polysynthetic features (Tangut has least of them all, because it was hugely influenced by Chinese) and are rather agglutinative.

To make it more clear:
- Polysynthetic (high word-to-morpheme ratio in verbs; head-marking; rich nominal incorporation; rich polypersonal agreement): East Gyalrongic;
- Mostly polysynthetic (high word-to-morpheme ratio in verbs; head-marking; rich nominal incorporation; poor polypersonal agreement): Khroskyabsic;
- Somewhat polysynthetic (high word-to-morpheme ratio in verbs but relatively small templates; dependent-marking; not so rich nominal incorporation; poor polypersonal agreement): Horpic (excl. Tangut);
- Rather not polysynthetic (sometimes high word-to-morpheme ratio in verbs but relatively small templates; dependent-marking; poor nominal incorporation; poor polypersonal agreement): Tangut.

[otto_ueue]

The fact that they needed a character specifically for the act of birds having sex is telling me that the Tanguts had to watch that scene at least 3 times every week.

[bobjones]

This is so funky! It looks like Chinese characters from an alternate dimension!

[stelcxantisto]

This language looks so cursed because it had so little time to develop, if it has ~1000 more years to develop it will be relatively stroke count optimized.

[alexandriatempest]

Of course skeleton uses the grass radical. Where do you think you'll find a random skeleton

[陆致云]

As a native Chinese speaker, Tangut script looks like something straight out of the uncanny valley but for characters

[SphereBoxCube]

You could argue that grass is a sort of tumor for the earth, maybe

[arno_grnfld]

It's like really intuitive but also really freaking complicated to write

[theEtch]

no way toppogi kanji lesson and maruhi academy collab two of my favourite upcoming niche subtopics of east asian language content creators

[TheTanoshimu]

There’s a lovely manga (it’s my all time favorite) about the saving of the tangut script during the Mongolian invasion. It’s called Shut Hell
The English translation of the first 20 chapters that you can find online isn’t great though. I’ve actually been slowly working on correcting it. This video appearing in my recommended has given me the motivation to finish re doing the first 20 chapters!

My profile pic is of on of the MCs

[Flozone]

Thank you for making probably the best and most accessible explanation of Tangut there is.

[paiwanhan]

@9:48 Well, Chinese yam or some other types of tuber I guess. It can't be potato because Europeans haven't colonized the Americas yet.

[manshoe]

10:48 did the xi xia even know what a potato was?

[nfrcomputers]

It reminds me of how the Cherokee syllabary was created by a man, Sequoyah, who knew what Latin letters looked like and what they did but couldn't actually read them

[rawcopper]

6:33

I was expecting "that's just a theory: a *string* theory"

[默-cr]

they all look the same, that must be a nightmare to learn

[ChristianJiang]

2:43 Simplified Chinese has 泪 which imho is pretty neat