Sogdian alphabet
| Sogdian | |
|---|---|
| Script type | |
Time period | Late Antiquity |
| Direction | Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts, top-to-bottom  |
| Languages | Sogdian |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
Child systems | Mongolian Orkhon script Manichaean script Old Uyghur alphabet |
The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdiana.[1] The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the Syriac alphabet.[1] It was used throughout Central Asia, from the edge of Iran in the west, to China in the east, from approximately 100 A.D. to 1200 A.D.[1]
Structure
Like the writing systems from which it is descended, the Sogdian writing system is an Abjad. The script consists of 17 consonants, many of which have alternate forms for initial, middle, and final position.[2]
Aramaic logograms also appear in the script, remnants of adapting the Aramaic writing system to local Iranian language.[3] These logograms are used mainly for functional words such as pronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.[1]
There are three main varieties of the Sogdian Script: Early Sogdian, an archaic non-cursive type; the Sutra script, a calligraphic script used in the Sogdian Buddhist texts, and the so-called "Uyghur" cursive script.[1] Early Sogdian appears primarily in the Ancient Letters (see below), and is characterized by distinct, separated graphemes.[3] As the script became more cursive and more stylized, some letters became more difficult to distinguish, or were distinguished only in final position, e.g. n and z.[3] Voiced and voiceless fricatives are consistently not distinguished in the script.[1]
Source Materials
The Sogdian script is known from religious texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity, as well as from secular sources such as letters, coins, and legal documents. The oldest known Sogdian documents are the Ancient Letters, found in 1920 by Sir Aurel Stein in a watchtower near Dunhuang, China.[2] These letters date to approximately 312-313 C.E. and are written in Early Sogdian.[1]
The Sogdian Buddhist texts, written in the Sutra script, are younger, dating to approximately the sixth to eighth or ninth century. They were found during the first two decades of the twentieth century in one of the caves of the Thousand Buddhas in the Chinese province of Kan-Su. The bulk of these manuscripts reside in the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.[1]
Another important discovery was of the Mug Documents in 1933 by Soviet scholars. These documents were found in the remains of a fortress on Mount Mug in northern Tajikistan. The documents, numbering over 76, were written on many different types of materials, such as paper, silk, wood, and skin. According to the dates on the documents, they date to the eighth century A.D. The majority of them were written using the Sogdian cursive script.[1]
Related Writing Systems
Although Sogdian is an Eastern Iranian language it has many Turkic child systems such as Old Uyghur and other eastern Turkic languages. When used for the Sogdian language, this alphabet was usually written in horizontal lines from right to left. When this adopted for Uyghur which was not Iranian language, it was normally in vertical direction from top to bottom, but with the first vertical line starting from the left side, not from the right as in Chinese, most probably because the right-to-left direction was used in horizontal writing. The Mongolian alphabet proper, being an adaptation of the Old Uyghur alphabet, still uses this kind of vertical writing, as does its remoter descendant Manchu.[4]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Gharib, B. (1995), Sogdian Dictionary: Sogdian-Persian-English, Tehran, Iran: Farhangan Publications, pp. xiii–xxxvi, ISBN 9645558069
- ^ a b Coulmas, Florian (1996), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 471–474, 512, ISBN 0631194460
- ^ a b c Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (1996), The World’s Writing Systems, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 515–536, ISBN 0195079930
- ^ F.W. Mote (1999). Imperial China, 900-1800. Harvard University Press. p. 42-43. ISBN 0674012127.