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Digital Approaches to Understanding Dongba Pictographs

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Abstract

The present study describes the implementation of several digital tools developed to assist the grammatological studies on the Dongba pictographic writing system. The entries in the Dictionary of Moso Hieroglyphs have been thoroughly scrutinized and reorganized according to their major semantic components. These provide a foundation for the construction of an online database of the Dongba pictographic script, with the web platform and a character set of a private use area font. The major theoretical frameworks and terminologies applied to study the Dongba script are reviewed, including the traditional Chinese approach and the IDS and IDC defined by the Unicode Consortium. The radicals can be divided into two categories: basic pictographs and complex pictographs—fusion units (with additional components attached to the corresponding basic pictographs). Based on these dimensions, a network analysis approach is introduced for grammatological research purposes. The algorithms in network analysis can be utilized for assessing the stage of development of the writing system. As a searchable database, it provides the possibility of a statistic approach to this not-yet-Unicode script and facilitates the visualization of glyph clusters sharing common components and a close analysis of the nature of the single elements in each glyph.

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Notes

  1. Detailed fieldwork report on Dongba script in area 2) to 4) can be found in Zhou (2015). According to the author’s analyses on the pictographs representing lunar mansions collected from E’ya (Zhu & Chen 1985), Lijiang (Li 2006; Rock 1963), and Ludian (Li et al., 1972), the areas 1), 3) and 4), the pattern is coherent. Besides the correspondences among graphemes and morphemes, the evolution of some graphic shapes also coincides with their related locations. For example, the grapheme “frog”, (Ludian) is the simplified version of (north-west of Lijiang). Moreover, the lunar mansion “the ear of the dzo ( , yattle)”, (E’ya), written through two separate pictograms, is considered the elder version of the combined glyph, (north-west of Lijiang) and (Dadong), while the one with indicative markers, (Ludian) should be the latest. The evolution order of Dongba glyphs is referred to case studies in Liu (2010: 42-43, 55).

  2. The English terms are quoted from Zamblera (2018).

  3. E-Dongba, the first keyboard for the Dongba script, employs Naxi pinyin and semantic values as two ways to type the pictographs. For the key-in purposes in the current research, besides Character Map, the Dongba pictographs are linked to Naxi pinyin through Fontself.

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  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Duoduo Xu

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The dataset generated and analyzed during the current study is available at the Dongba Glyphs with a Radical Index repository, duoduo-lab.github.io/.

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Xu, D. Digital Approaches to Understanding Dongba Pictographs. Int J Digit Humanities 4, 131–146 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-022-00057-4

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