Seaver Milnor

University of Washington

The Naxi Dongba pictographic script is strikingly different from Chinese characters in the complexity of graphs. To draw an analogy with ancient Egyptian, even the traditional Chinese characters still in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan are like a simplified ‘hieratic’ or ‘demotic’ script when compared with hieroglyphic Dongba texts. In terms of the environment for their genesis, Chinese and Dongba pictographs could also not be more different. Whereas Chinese writing was a new invention ex nihilo, Dongba pictographs developed in the presence of other scripts, including an alphabetic one. Nonetheless, the central thesis of this paper is that the inventors of the Dongba script followed the same process for creating graphs as has been well established for Hanzi. William Boltz’s The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (1994) forms the theoretical framework for how writing systems develop. Data demonstrating the structural graphic similarities is drawn from Naxi xiangxing wenzi pu 納西象形文字譜by Fang Guoyu and He Zhiwu (1995).

Pictographs—drawings of “things”—are the first graphs to appear in a fledgling script. Paranomasia, also known as the Rebus Principle, allows one to write words for abstract concepts by using the graphs for homophonous or nearly homophonous words—at this point true writing, rather than inchoate proto-writing, is possible. Disambiguation occurs when various semantic classifiers are added to a phonetic component to distinguish words with similar pronunciations; these xingsheng 形聲or xiesheng 諧聲 graphs comprise the vast majority of modern Chinese characters and an important category of the liushu 六書 of Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (ca. 100). From this point, Chinese and the Naxi Dongba script diverge because the former was needed for pragmatic daily use and simplified over the centuries whereas the latter maintained its complexity, I argue, for aesthetic purposes because its use was limited to ritual texts.

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Naomichi KUROSAWA（黑泽直道）日本国学院大学

The ritual texts used in the religion of the Naxi people are written in a distinct script known as “Dongba script”, which is both written in and read by Naxi priests, themselves known as “Dongba”. Dongba pictographs do not fully correspond to language elements such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes and words, and are highly indefinite. Hence, it has been held that only Dongba priests who had memorized the content of Dongba ritual texts were capable of reading them.

However, by comparing the pictographs of a number of ritual texts, inscribed with the same content, it is evident that within the script there are both definite pictographs, which are inscribed in nearly all of the texts, and indefinite pictographs, which appear in only a few texts. Furthermore, in most cases, definite pictographs are those representing nouns or proper nouns. In contrast, indefinite pictographs are often phonetic-equivalent characters that use other pictographs of different meaning but the same pronunciation. When the indefinite pictographs are removed from a given text to leave just the definite ones, what remains is the framework of the text. It is possible that a hypothesis of a framework for ritual texts will assist in discerning the content of texts collected by researchers and explorers that now lie dormant in libraries and research institutions worldwide and that have not come to light through Dongba priests’ recitations and transcription by scholars.

In this research, pictographs appearing in nine texts found in the beginning of the Naxi creation myth “Coq bber tv” are classified into definite and indefinite groups on the basis of frequency of appearance within the texts, and a framework showing the definite pictographs only is extracted. There then follows a brief discussion of the meanings of this framework.

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Gao Feng

Naxi dongba pictograph has been well-known as “living fossil”which are original symbols all over the world.It is very important for us to research Dongba pictograph`s derivation and evolution.Naxi dongba pictograph is definitely a treasury in Chinese history,so many famous experts have studied on it.

I has been fascinated on Dongba pictograph after I visited Mr.He jicai`s Dongba pictograph exhibition by chance.I has been concentrating all of my efforts on learning Dongba pictograph in my spare times since then.

In 1998,I created around 40 workings such as: Millions of soldiers and the public tried their best to fight with the flood.One of my workings which was called The misery farewell bwteen little Jiang shan and grandmother.was won the second prize in Nation-wide elderly culture & sports competition.Then,I was invited to attend the 1999 international academic conference of Lijiang dongba culture & art`s festival.In early of 2000,I wrote the first edition of Naxi three important worship—-worship heaven,worship shu(dragon) and worship wind,these three books were published by Yunnan minority press in 2001.On march 5^th,2005,the origin copy of worship heaven and other 200 Dongba pictograph workings were exhibited in Texas state museum of asian culture center,USA.My wife and my daughter were received warm welcome and the honorary citizen certificate from the Mayor of Corpus christi.

The 2008 Beijing Olmpic is a delightful affair of Chinese.I created 74 Dongba pictograph workings which were based on the 29^th Olmpic Ordinary knowledges of competition and the Paralympic Basic knowledges in order to celebrate this magnificent sports meeting.Besides,I designed 54 Olmpic`s seals ,which were carved by my friend,has been used in my workings already.The athlete`s images in my workings are vivid,for example,Liu xiang`s hurdle race,Tian liang and Guo jinjin`s dive,etc.The readers will get strong shock from the paralmpic`s pas de deux.As everyone knows,calligraphy could be shown only one scence,but in my workings,a series of actions,such as;dive are composed of jumping,turning,tucking and entering were all shown in one piece of paer.So,the dull picture was changed into vivid cartoon.

Along these ten years,my experience of creation is:Dongba pictograph has its own endless representation.Therefore,The focus of my composition will still be based on “human being”in Dongba language

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