Talk:Tangut script

西夏国書字典音同

http://www.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki/html/ho05/ho05_01900/index.html

http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/ho05/ho05_01900/ho05_01900.pdf

http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/ho05/ho05_01900/ho05_01900.html

Rajmaan (talk) 20:28, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Writing Direction?

Why would Tangut be written 'left-to-right' as in Modern Chinese? Shouldn't it be right to left as Chinese was back in that time period? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reboot01 (talk • contribs) 14:17, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

I don't consider that either Chinese or Tangut were written right-to-left, but rather vertically in columns running right-to-left. As far as I know true rtl format (horizontal lines of rtl text running top-to-bottom down the writing surface) was never used for Chinese or Tangut. In cases such as image captions where text seems to be written rtl, in reality it is formatted in vertical columns of one character length written right-to-left. But from Wikipedia's perspective all that is irrelevant, as Wikipedia must reflect actual modern usage, and modern usage is to write Tangut left-to-right. BabelStone (talk) 16:36, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

That's what I meant, sorry, and thanks, I didn't realize that's what the section meant, I thought it meant how it was historically written, since Tangut isn't really written anymore except in (mostly) academic papers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reboot01 (talk • contribs) 05:59, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Yes, historically it was only written vertically, top-to-bottom, in right-to-left stacked columns (this is how it appeared in all discovered historical artefacts). However the script is now more commonly used in academic or historical papers and arts within a modern Chinese (or Japanese) context where the rest of the text is written horizontally. So it is customary (in such modern uses) to find it written horizontally, from left-to-right, in top-to-bottom stacked rows, i.e. exactly like CJK ideographs which followed exactly the same principle; the right-to-left stacking order of lines of text (in the vertical persentation) does not matter, what is important is the top-to-bottom; this is still a normal left-to-right script, just like CJK ideographs (and more importantly no "Bidi" ordering algorithm is necessary, just like when Latin/Greek/Cyrillic are presented vertically in some "traditional" CJK presentations). The reuse of this script in modern context is quite recent (and never got very popular before the famous tangutologist Li Fan Wen studied this script and finally published an extensive dictionnary, starting in 2001 and updated in 2008). Tangutologists are still working on this script (with academic papers published in Chinese, Russian, Japanese and English), whose complete understanding is still not complete (and there are still unsolved issues, including in Unicode where the ideographic character properties are still not stable enough, notably the radical components that were disunified in Unicode 17.0, and various inconsistencies in the total stroke counts; even representative glyphs are being fixed, and there will continue to be some additional disunifications for existing components; the IDS data for Tangut ideographs are still not complete or have errors that won't be fixed before January 2026 after the next UTC meeting and a public review, that will include discussions for some essential character properties for non-Han ideographic scripts, intended to be stabilized only in Unicode 18.0, but that may turn to be still informative best-practices and not normalized). The IRGSEWG needs to work on these issues, and for now the Tangut script is only partly encoded in the UCS, but without any meaningful properties (meaning that it is still not usable at all for localized data for any language, e.g. in CLDR, not even just for the Tangut language with ISO 646-3 code "txg", as the orthography is still too much instable, with its inconsistant "pseudo-informative" properties in Unicode 17.0!). Unicode, the SEWG, authors of encoding and proposals or updates have already acknowledged the problem (but they are not many people qualified for that, and most of them are busy or retired, and don't have the time to work on this before months, so things won't be corrected soon, and they do need (and appreciate) help to signal them the discrepancies to the UTC and/or to the SEWG (this was confirmed as well in the recent UTC meeting, but not everything could be ready and I fear it won't be ready for the next SEWG meeting in January, or before the start of Unicode 18.0 alpha review in next spring; the ISO WG2 has also been alerted). verdy_p (talk) 12:54, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

Orthography of the Tangut Script and Language

Should the Tangut language text on this page, and other pages with Tangut, be 'standardized' with the simplified Tangut orthography in Tangut numerals, or should it be left as it is? I think it would help with new readers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reboot01 (talk • contribs) 05:58, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

It would be great if we could agree on a consistent system of Tangut transcription for use on Wikipedia. @Greg Pandatshang: already suggested using Marc Miyake's simplified phonetic notation almost five years ago at Talk:Western Xia#Tangut language transcription. I would prefer to use Miyake's phonetic notation rather than the phonetic reconstructions given in Li Fanwen's and Kychanov's dictionaries, but I think that there is an argument for using his complex notation rather than his simplified notation when giving the reading of individual Tangut characters, otherwise some characters may appear to be homophones when actually there is a difference in reading and/or tone. BabelStone (talk) 11:02, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Maybe we could have it separated by a '/', have Miyake's transcription, and then the more complex Fanwen/Kychanov one. Reboot01 (talk) 3:29, 5 December 2019 (UTC)