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standardised form which corresponded to the Chinese k'ai-shu style. These
two types of writing, as well as the semicursive Chinese forms (hing-shu) and
the Chinese abridged writing (ts'ao-shu), are found among the documents.

Still in 1916 Laufer wrote (T'oung Pao, vol. XVII p. 4-5), " It is perhaps the
most complicated system ever invented by a human mind, — ideographic, like
Chinese, the single characters being composed of a bewildering mass of irregular
lines, in which no method or principle has as yet been disclosed ". — The
basis of this writing is without the slightest doubt the ideography of Chinese
characters of the chuan ductus. The ideograms are in part phonetic, in part
they serve to transcribe Dhāranis, foreign words, Chinese and Tangut names
of families and places, and in part to furnish grammatical particles. In dicto-
naries they are generally separated after the Fan-tsi 反 切 method into two
phonetic (Tangut or) Chinese characters. As ideograms are meant for the eye
rather than for the ear, it is impossible to determine the phonetic equivalent,
except when one knows what dialect of all the multitude of Chinese dialects is
expected to be deciphered. The two Chinese ideograms were written, as was
the custom, in columns. The sequence of characters was adapted from the
sequence in vocabularies (particularly the one compiled in 1190 by the Tangut
Ku-lo Mao-ts'ai 骨 勒 茂 才, the Fan-han ho shi chang chung chu 番 漢 合 時
掌 中 珠) that is to say, the characters were read from right to left.

Thanks to this, it has been possible to decipher an increasing number of
ideograms, their meaning as well as their phonetics. Finally it has been proved
that they belong to the Tibeto-Burmese group of languages. In this group,
among the languages still spoken today, that of the Lolo and of the Moso are
the most similar. Using the first syllable of the words, Laufer has collected them
in a group called " Si-lo-mo ". What is common to all of these languages is,
for example, the lack of k, p, t as terminal consonants. The Tangut language
had, like the Chinese, five different tones: the high even tone, the low even
tone, the rising tone, the descending tone, and the sharp tone. The grammatical
rules of the language are generally laws of harmony. Thus the adjective (the
attribute), is sometimes found after the word to be explained, sometimes before
(as in Tibetan). The verb (predicate) is always at the end of the sentence.

THE WRITING AND LANGUAGE OF THE K'I-TAN 髡 丹
by WILLY BARUCH

Si-hia writing is probably derived from that of the K'i-tan, but although we
know considerably today about the language and writing of the Si-hia, we are
as yet unable to say anything definite about the system of writing or about the
language of the K'i-tan.

The history of this people, who during the XI, XII and XIII centuries played