15.7.25.23:05: MANUAL METAL ACTION?: TANGUT 2CHYR'3 'TO SHOOT'

(=++?)

3471 2chyr'3 'to shoot' (= left of 3485 1laq1 'hand' + 'metal' (< top of 1shon3 'iron') + 5113 1vi3 'to do'?)

whose analysis is unknown. (Above is my guess. The combination of elements on the right side of 3471 is unique to that tangraph.)

Li listed 3471 as a Chinese loanword. But the closest word in the Chinese dialect known to the Tangut was 射 *3sha3 < *3zha3 < *m-lak-s 'to shoot', and it would have been borrowed as *sha3 or *zha3 (omitting unpredictable tones), not 2chyr'3 which I assume is a native word from pre-Tangut *RcəXH or *cərXH:

- *R- could be a dental stop or *l- that lenited to preinitial *r- as well as *r-; *r- and *-r conditioned retroflexion of the vowel before disappearing

- *c could have been *[c], *[tɕ], *[tʃ], or *[tʂ] (though I suspect retroflexion was a late phenomenon in Tangut)

- *-X symbolizes the source of the unknown phonetic quality that I transcribe with the prime symbol (-')

- *-H is the glottal source of the second ('rising') tone

I can't narrow down the possibilities because I can't find any strong candidate for an outside cognate. Pumi has khətʂhɑ (with tones depending on variety) 'to shoot' with aspiration absent in Tangut (my ch may have been unaspirated [tʂ]) and nothing corresponding to Tangut vowel retroflexion.  Pumi may be Tangut's closest living relative (Jacques 2014); its sound correspondences with Tangut remain to be explored. (Unfortunately, there are no Pumi words ending in low back -ɑ with proposed Tangut cognates in Jacques' book.)

Does 3471 have any internal cognates in Tangut? Let's look at its (near-)homophones from Homophones A 35B43-35B54:

Homophones	Tangraph	Li Fanwen number	Reading	Gloss
35B43		1349	2chyr'3	first half of 2chyr'3-2lu1 'sage'
35B44		1783		'five' (in the 'ritual' language which I suspect was a non-Sino-Tibetan substratum language)
35B45		2803		the surname Chyr
35B46		3267		skill, artistry
35B47		3482	1chyr'3	to pare
35B51		3483		to attack (only attested in Homophones?)
35B52		2321	2chyr'3	afraid, scared
35B53		3826		to twine, wind, tie up; < *RcəXH or *cərXH
35B54		5223		half of 2chyr'3 1geq4 ~ 1geq4 2chyr'3 'constellation'; first half of the name of the Tangut ancestor 2chyr'3 2jwa3

None have anything to do with shooting.

Near-homophones without 'prime' don't have any semantic similarity to 3471:

2176 1chyr3 'to tie' (< *Rcə or *cər; cognate to 3826 above)

1359 the second half of 2phy1 2chyr3 'conceited'

5245 1chy < *cə 'to draw a bow' (only attested in dictionaries?)

3471 may be 5245 plus a prefix *R- and an affix *X (I don't know if *X is a prefix or suffix, though I conventionally write it as a suffix since I have to put it somewhere). So I can reject my earlier *cərXH since *-r is not a suffix.

Lastly, how do we know 3471 means 'to shoot'? It is apparently only attested in Homophones, where it is preceded by the clarifier

5710 1liq4 'arrow' < *S-li (cognate to Old Chinese 矢 *l̥iʔ 'arrow'?)

so I suppose it's been assumed that 3471 is a verb since Tangut has object-verb order. However, I don't know how one can be certain that 3471 means 'to shoot' and not, say, 'to pull out of a quiver'. 3471 might even be a noun like 'quiver' modified by 5710.

I am skeptical of definitions of Tangut words known only from Homophones unless they have clarifiers like 'name' which leave no room for interpretation.

15.7.25.13:07: LOOKED AROUND AT DECORATIONS

I was wondering if the verb 2khu'4-2rer4 'watch-direction' from my last post was a hapax legomenon. Thanks to Andrew West for pointing out that it occurs on the last page of the last ode:

......

3468 3457 4342 2258 3349 1vir1 1siw4 2da4-2khu'4-2rer4 '(...decoration?) new PERF-watch-direction'

Unfortunately, the surrounding characters were lost due to damage.

I suspect the character before 3468 is 5371, as 3468 is the second half of

5371 3468 1taq4 1vir1 'decoration', 'to be decorated' (see Kychanov and Arakawa 2006: 634)

and I do not know if 3468 can occur by itself*.

In any case,  4342 2258 3349 looks like a perfective verb 'looked around', and 3457 'new' modifies its object (5371?) 3468 'decoration' (?).

It occurred to me today that 3349 might be a verb ('to direct'), so 2258 3349 would be a verb-verb rather than a verb-object sequence. But Kychanov and Arakawa (2006: 313) nor Li Fanwen (2008: 543) list it only as a noun. Does 2258 3349 reflect an earlier period when 3349 could also be a verb?

*Li Fanwen 2008: 562 lists no examples of 3468 in isolation other than dictionary definitions. Li Fanwen 2008: 847 gives the impression that 5371 is almost always followed by 3468； the one exception is

0542 5371 2shwo3 1taq4

which he defined as 嚴飾, interpreted as a verb 'to decorate' by Kychanov and Arakawa (2006: 429).

15.7.24.23:54: LOOKING IN FOUR DIRECTIONS: THE TANGUT VERB-OBJECT COMPOUND 2KHU'4-2RER4

While preparing for part 3 of "Grokking Up", I saw this phrase in Li Fanwen (2008: 374)*:

4684 2205 3349 2258 3349 1me1 1lyr'3 2rer4 2khu'4-2rer4 'eye four direction watch-direction'

It caught my eye (pun unintended!) because 2rer4 'direction' appears twice, though there is only one 'direction' in Li Fanwen's Chinese translation 目視於四方, lit. 'eye look in four direction'.

Kychanov and Arakawa (2006: 316) regard 2khu'4-2rer4 'watch-direction' as a verb 'look from side to side; look around'. Those glosses make sense in this context. Does this verb occur in other texts?

Tangut is a verb-final language, so I am surprised that a compound verb would have a verb-object structure instead of an object-verb structure. Are there other verbs of that type? Could the first four words be modifying the noun 'direction': 'the direction from which the eye watches the four directions'?

*7.25.0:25: Li Fanwen gives the source of this phrase as Tangraphic Sea 67.113 (i.e., the third entry in column 1 of side 1 [= the right side] of page 67), but it's not there. I assume 67.113 is a typo.

15.7.23.23:53: GROKKING UP TANGUT PERFECTIVE PREFIXES (PART 2: WRITING 'UP')

Given that the Tangut script has a reputation for being largely semantically based, it is curious that the seven characters for directional perfective prefixes do not share a common graphic denominator. Nor do they incorporate parts of characters for directions. For instance,

=+

5981 1a0- 'up-', 'one' = left of 5951 1a0, first half of 1a0 1chwa3 'boots worn in mud' +  3654 1a0, first half of 1a0 1shy2 'monk' / a surname / kinship term prefix

does not have any components in common with, say,

1890 2be4 'high', 2612 2phu4 'up, above, over', or 2750 1ghu2 'head' (i.e., something on top)

The Tangraphic Sea analysis of 5981 (above) is circular, as its supposed sources 3654 and 5951 are in turn derived from 5981:

=+

3654 = left of 3119 1i4 'many' + all of 5981

=+

5951 =  left of 5981 + left of 1321 1ziq4 'boots'

Both 3654 and 5951 are phonosemantic compounds: 'person' (the left side of 'many') + a and 'boots' + a.

5981 in turn shares a phonetic left-hand component

with 5951. Could that component (Boxenhorn alphacodes: cil/cur) be derived from the left-hand side of Chinese 阿 (1a1 in the northwestern dialect known to the Tangut)? That would make it a distant cousin of the Japanese katakana character ア which is also derived from the left-hand side of Chinese 阿.

7.24.13:27: Both 5981 and 

4541 1a0 (Sanskrit a)

transcribed Sanskrit long ā (Arakawa 1997: 112). However, there was also a special character

=+

4623 2a'2 = 4541 + 0443 'long'

for Sanskrit long ā, and 4541 normally represented Sanskrit short a. Moreover, 5981, 4541, and 4623 belonged to different homophone groups in Homophones and had different fanqie in Tangraphic Sea.  I conclude that 4541 sounded most like Sanskrit a* and that 5981 differed somehow: e.g., it may have been 1a4 whereas 4541 may have been 1a1 or even 1a2 (if it had the same grade as 4623 2a'2). (-0 in the readings of 5981 and 4541 indicates an unknown grade. The grades of the fanqie final spellers of 5981 and 4541 are unknown:

0165 1ha0 [Sanskrit hi, he, hye - sic!] and 4475 1ha0 [Sanskrit ha and hā].

The use of 0165 for Sanskrit front-vowel syllables implies that its rhyme - and hence the rhyme of 5981 - was palatal: i.e., Grade IV.)

It is tempting to assume that some aspect of 2a'2 absent from 1a0 - the second tone, the 'prime' quality of the rhyme (transcribed as -'), and/or Grade II - was associated with length, but many Tangut transcriptions of Sanskrit syllables with long vowels lack most or all of those qualities: e.g.,

3948 and 3985 1ka'4 for Sanskrit kā and 5299 1ta1 for Sanskrit tā

Unlike Gong and Arakawa, I doubt that vowel length played a role in the complex Tangut vowel system. If Tangut had long vowels, they would have systematically corresponded to Sanskrit long vowels in transcriptions.

*Or to be more precise, the pronunciation of Sanskrit a known to the Tangut. In the Indian phonetic tradition, Sanskrit a was [ə], but the Tangut probably heard something like [a] because they would have borrowed [ə] as the central vowel that I transcribe as y, not a.

15.7.22.23:59: THE <ɃI⁝>-GINNING OF THE MYAZEDI INSCRIPTION

Writing about Tangut perfective prefixes made me wonder if Pyu had a perfective prefix. An obvious candidate for such a prefix could be transliterated as <ḅi⁝>.

The word is problematic even on the level of transliteration:

- does Pyu have a <b> : <ƀ> distinction?

- are three dots in Pyu equivalent to an overdot-'colon' sequence?

- is the overdot a nasal like anusvāra or something else? The fact that it also occurs in <tȧ> 'one' and <hrȧ> 'eight' corresponding to Old Burmese <tac> and <het> suggests that it might stand for a stop.

- is the 'colon' a fricative like visarga or something else?

Here are the first two occurrences of <ḅi⁝> in the Pyu A text of the Myazedi inscription (following Blagden's 1919 analysis):

The verb after the first <ƀi⁝> (if that <ƀi⁝> is a verbal prefix and not an unrelated homophone) does not seem to correspond to any of the verbs in the other three languages of the Myazedi inscription (see Appendices 1-3 below).

Maybe <pdụ̄ sgu dạ: ƀa tva> is a sequence of a verb followed by 'since'. Perhaps that verb was intransitive: e.g., 'die' (a multi-word honorific euphemism?) or 'rise'. I don't think that verb was transitive because I would expect its object to precede it, and I would not expect 'nirvana' or 'religion' to have an honorific suffix which is generally otherwise an honorific prefix (!)  for people (or images of them) in this inscription. Given the large number of Indic loans in Pyu, I would be surprised if there was a native term for 'nirvana' or 'religion' (unless the latter were 'teaching'). I think <ḅȧ:> might have originally been a noun, and <ƀa dọ ḅȧ:> might be a native title for the Buddha corresponding to Old Burmese <purhā skhaṅ> (see Appendix 2).or Old Mon <kyek ... tirley> (see Appendix 3).

Could <pdụ̄ sgu dạ: ƀa tva> be a prefix-object-verb(-'since'?) sequence with 'nirvana' or 'religion' somewhere in it?. (7.23.2:48: Cf. noun incorporation between directional perfective prefixes and verbs in Tangut. See Jacques 2014: 266. If Pyu did have incorporation, it is likely to have developed independently, as Pyu <ƀi⁝-> does not look like a cognate of any Tangut directional perfective prefix other than 2vy3- whose v- may or may not be from a lenited labial stop.)

Could <ƀi⁝-tvạ:-thada> be analogous in structure to Russian pro-sh-lo 'PERF-go-PAST' = 'passed'?

Does <ƀi⁝-> correspond to the Old Burmese indefinite past suffix <liy> (see Appendix 2)?

Does <-thada> end sentences, or is it a continuative suffix like Old Burmese <brī rakā> (see Appendix 2)?

APPENDIX 1: THE START OF THE PALI A TEXT (Duroiselle 1919; the glosses are mine; I don't know what anārikaṃ means or what vā [normally 'or'] is doing)

Duroiselle's translation: 'Prosperity! Having bowed to the Buddha and the other (two) Excellent Objects, I shall relate the noble work of merit performed, in the Conqueror's dispensation, by Rājakumāra. Hearken to me! When one thousand six hundred and twenty-eight years had elapsed after the Nirvāṇa of the Lord of the World [...]'

APPENDIX 2: THE START OF THE OLD BURMESE A TEXT (Duroiselle 1919)

Duroiselle's translation: 'Prosperity! Honour to the Buddha! One thousand six hundred and twenty-eight years of the Buddha's religion having elapsed [...]'

APPENDIX 3: THE START OF THE OLD MON A TEXT (Blagden 1919)

Blagden's translation: 'Prosperity! Honour to Buddha! Prosperity! After the religion of the Lord Buddha had gone on for one thousand six hundred and twenty-eight years [...]'

15.7.21.23:57: GROKKING UP TANGUT PERFECTIVE PREFIXES (PART 1: OVERVIEW)

Tangut has a set of directional perfective prefixes that remind me a bit of perfective prefixes of prepositional origin in Slavic and adverbs of prepositional origin in English. Arakawa's Studies on the Tangut Version of the Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā (2014: 149) reproduces Nishida's (1989) list of directional perfective prefixes with the addition of a seventh prefix in a footnote:

Direction (Arakawa 2014: 149, based on Nishida 1989)	Direction (Gong 2003)	Tangraph	Arakawa reading	This site	Arakawa's (2014) notes on usage in the Tangut version of the Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā summarized	Frequency in Sea of Meaning (Arakawa 2015: 18)	Arakawa's (2015) notes summarized
upward			1a?-	1a0-	high frequency (p. 149)	16	" 'upward' in many cases"
downward			1na:-	1na4-	low frequency (p. 149)	12	" 'downward' in most cases"
here, toward the speaker	here, inside		1kI:-	1ky4-	low frequency (p. 150)	40	"might be 'inside' in some cases"
there, away from the speaker	there, outside		2wI:-	2vy3-	used with adverbs indicating the past (e.g., 1pI: 2no: 'long ago' = my 1py4 2no4) and in the word 2wI: 2rar 'past' (= my 2vy3 2rar1; prefixed to a verb 'to pass'; cf. English past; p. 150)	29	"Probably [...] 'outside' "
upriver; inward	away from the speaker		2da:-	2da4-	used with various verbs without any common denominator (p. 150)	43	"Here, the tendency is 'away from the speaker or agent', 'not accessible', and 'to leave, not to return' [...] In some cases, the verb following 2da:- seems to be 'unhappy'."
downriver; outward	"direction not found"		2rI:r-	2ryr4-	often with verbs of speaking but also with 'to come' and 'to arrive' (p. 151)	26	"difficult to determine the direction"; "precedes some verbs related to vocal acts"
(not given)	towards the speaker		2dI:-	2dy4-	often with verbs of taking unlawfully by force; rare (p. 152)	4	"so rare"; direction "uncertain"

(Thanks to Mahādātṛ for Arakawa's 2015 article "On the Tangut verb phrase in The Sea of Meaning Established by the Saints".)

Arakawa and Gong agree on the functions of the first two prefixes. Their interpretations of the second two partially overlap, and their views on the last three are very different.

The -0 in my reading of the first prefix indicates that its grade is unknown. The other prefixes all belong to Grade IV (indicated by -4) except for the third prefix which has Grade III (indicated by -3; Grade IV cannot occur with v-). The significance of this skewing is unknown. (7.22.0:50: If Tangut and Chinese grades have similar origins, then Tangut Grades III/IV may have developed in unmarked syllables, just as Chinese Grade III and chongniu Grade IV developed in nonemphatic [i.e., unmarked] syllables. I expect affixes to tend to be phonologically unmarked. I believe Old Chinese grammatical morphemes tend to be nonemphatic.)

The prefixes either have a or y (phonetically a nonlow central vowel like schwa). They may have been unstressed and therefore only had the achromatic (i.e., neither palatal nor labial) subset of the Tangut vowel system.

Arakawa (2014) did not supply frequency statistics for perfective prefixes in the Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā. Nonetheless it is clear from his text that their frequencies do not match those in the Sea of Meanings: e.g., the most common prefix in Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā is 1a0-, whereas it is 2da4- in The Sea of Meaning. I do not know whether this difference is due to geography, chronology, and/or genre. It would be interesting to see how individual verbs are prefixes in those two texts and others. My dream is to have a Tangut verb dictionary containing all attested affixes with text-specific frequency data. We are still far from being able to say that we have

1a0-2tse4-2ni4 'understood' = lit. 'up-understand-PL' (= the "Grokked Up" of the post title*)

how Tangut verbs work. The outlines have been established; the details remain unclear.

*7.22.0:28: Based on Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā 18.4

1a0-2tse4-2nga1 'I understood' = lit. 'up-understand-1S'

with the suffix changed.

15.7.20.23:55: WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF ROHINGYA TONES?

Are the three tones described in this Unicode proposal for the Rohingya script due to Burmese influence? What conditioned each tone? The low frequency of the tonal signs suggests that tones may have arisen as compensation for lost low-frequency segments or segmental features. What is the pitch associated with the absence of a tonal sign?

Do Burmese loanwords have tones, and if so, do they retain their original tones, have Rohingya approximations of those tones, or have yet other tones?

Might Rohingya have pitch accent instead of Southeast Asian-style tones?

I just learned that Unicode has six characters called "ARABIC TONE" (08EA-08EF) corresponding to the Rohingya tone characters. Are those six characters used in Arabic-script Rohingya? (7.21.0:03: Yes. I was thinking they might have been invented for some African language.)

Wikipedia states that the Rohingya script has "a few borrowings from Roman and Burmese", but I can't find them.

15.7.19.23:57: WHY DOESN'T MON <ṄA> LOOK LIKE BURMESE <ṄA>?

Mon and Burmese are written in variants of the same script. Hence the Mon and Burmese spellings of 'Tenasserim' are similar:

Mon: တနၚ်သြဳ <tanaṅsrī>

Burmese: တနင်္သာရီ <tanaṅsārī> [tənɪ̀ɴθàjì]

One difference is not as great as it seems. Burmese <ṅ> is written as a superscript ɛ-like shape atop <sa>. When written on the line (with its inherent vowel restored), Burmese င <ṅa> looks like Mon ၚ <ṅa> except for the lack of a bottom stroke. (The top stroke of Mon ၚ် indicates that ၚ <ṅa> is to be read without its inherent vowel.) Burmese င <ṅa> is clearly a rounded descendant of Brahmi 𑀗 <ṅa>. The Mon character in the Myazedi inscription from nine centuries ago looks like modern Burmese င <ṅa>. When did the Mon add a stroke, and why? And does that bottom stroke have anything to do with the bottom parts attached to C-shapes in <ṅa> in other Indic scripts: e.g., Devanagari ङ?

7.20.1:36:: IndoSkript shows ㄷ-shaped characters for <ṅa> from c. 100-200 AD. Then it displays a <ṅa> resembling Tibetan ང <ṅa> atop a ㅅ shape from c. 350-375 AD in Kuchar - in what is now northwestern China, quite far from the Mon. Is that ㅅ-shape relevant to the reversed S-shape at the bottom of Mon ၚ <ṅa>? That shape resembles the <ṅa> of the Manur inscription (c. 840-880 AD) in what is now Tamil Nadu. Could Mon ၚ <ṅa> originate from a stack of two <ṅa>?