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16.9.12.11:21: A VEXING VOLUME

At the beginning of "An Interesting Reading", I mentioned the Tangut text

3457 0478 1483 2323 5404 4625 5302 1siw4 1sho'3 2ne4 1vy1 1la1 2me'4 0L?

'new collect compassion piety record final volume'

whose final character has an unknown reading. 0- indicates an unknown tone. L- indicates an unknown Class IX initial (l- lh- ld- r- z- zh-). ? indicates an unknown rhyme. I am going to start using -0 for an unknown grade.

This character appears as an initial speller in this fanqie chain:

=+

1165 1luq3 'to rub, knead' = 5302  0L?0 + 0500 1tsuq4

(There is no phonemic distinction between Grades III and IV in rhyme 62 -uq3/4; the grade is automatically determined by the initial.)

=+

4550 1lheq4 'sorcerer' = 1165 1luq3 + 3318 1cheq3

(There is no phonemic distinction between Grades III and IV in rhyme 64 -eq3/4; the grade is automatically determined by the initial.)

I have converted the readings from Gong's reconstruction from Li Fanwen (2008) into my system. I am unaware of any transcriptive evidence for 1165 and 4550 - or even any attestations of either character outside dictionaries. How can 1165 have a known initial if the initial of its initial speller is unknown? Why not reconstruct 1165 as 1Luq3/4? (l- r- zh- would be followed by Grade III and ld- lh- z- by Grade IV.) And why does the initial of 4550 (lh-) not match the initial of its initial speller 1165 (l-)? Shouldn't 4550 be reconstructed as 0Leq3/4?

How many other Tangut character readings are shaky?


16.9.11.23:03: AN INTERESTING READING

I've been filling holes in my Tangut character folder lately. So far I have images for 3,634 out of the 6,125 Tangut characters in Unicode 9.0: i.e., about 59% of the total. The fact that I haven't needed images for two out of five characters even after nearly eleven years of blogging about Tangut indicates how skewed the distribution of characters is. aI estimate the number of distinct characters in Guillaume Jacques' index to the

3457 0478 1483 2323 5404 4625 5302 1siw4 1sho'3 2ne4 1vy1 1la1 2me'4 0L?

'new collect compassion piety record final volume'

to be about a thousand.

The reading of 5302 is unknown. It is in the section for characters without homophones in the ninth chapter of Homophones, so it must have an L-type initial (l- lh- ld- r- z- zh). Beyond that nothing else can be said. I know of no transcriptions of it.

The reading of the first half of

4006 5383 0TS? 2se4 'interest' (in the financial sense)

should be unknown. Yet Li Fanwen (2008: 643) lists Gong's reconstructed reading as 2tswər. This reading was not in Li Fanwen (1997: 740). Kychanov and Arakawa (2006: 367), on the other hand, list the Sofronov-style reconstruction 2?ə̣.

How does anyone know what the rhyme of 4006 is? The character does not appear as a final speller in any fanqie. I do not know of any transcriptions of it that could even give us a vague idea of what the rhyme might have been. And transcriptions would not indicate the tone which I have written as 0- for unknown.

I write the initial as capital TS- to indicate that it belonged to class VI (alveolar sibilants other than z- which I suspect might have been lateral [ɮ]). But I don't know which class VI initial it had: ts-, tsh-, dz-, or s-.

Lastly, how does anyone know what 4006 5383 means? Neither edition of Li cites any attestations outside dictionaries, and Li (1997: 740, 974) lists no definitions for either 4006 or 5383. Have Kychanov and/or Arakawa found such attestations and identified the meaning from context?


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