Quick Facts Type Logographic Genealogy Sinitic Location East Asia > Manchuria Time 920 to 1125 CE Direction Top to Bottom

From 916 to 1125 CE, the Khitan dynasty, also known as Liao in Chinese, dominated much of Manchuria. They spoke an Altaic language, most likely under the subgrouping of Mongolic. To write down their language, the Khitan people employed two distinct scripts in parallel. The first one, simply called the "large script" by Chinese sources, appeared around 920 CE. The second one, not surprisingly called the "small script", was reputedly created by the Khitan scholar Diela around 925 CE with inspiration from the Uyghur alphabet. For the most part, the two systems did not seem to share any signs in common at all, and different significantly in the ways in which signs were combined and assembled.

The "Large Script"

Signs in the "large script" tradition are written vertically starting from the top, with equal spacing between the signs. The inventory of signs comprised mostly of logograms, which are signs that express morphemes or words. Some of the signs appear to have been borrowed directly or with some modification from Chinese characters. Others cannot be shown to have links with any Chinese characters, and thus probably were indigenous inventions.

Some of the signs of the large script were borrowed into the later Jurchen script.

The "Small Script"

The Khitan "small script" is a better understood writing system due to a larger surving corpus of text. Recall that Khitan was an Altaic language, and like other languages of this family, its words contain multiple syllables with abundant suffixes for word derivation and verb conjugation. The Khitan small script reflects this characteristic in that it contains approximately 370 symbols, including logograms, syllabograms and single-sound phonograms used together to pretty accurately represent the nuissances of Khitan language.

Phonetic signs are very abundant in Khitan small script. First there are vowel and diphthong signs:

Consonants are represented as part of syllabograms or as standalone signs. Some signs are used as both single consonants as well as consonant-vowel syllabic signs.

The polysyllabic nature of Khitan means that a word is constructed from multiple signs. Unlike the large script, which put equal spacing between signs, the arrangment in the small script was more complex. Component signs are put into pairs horizontall, while pairs are stacked one on top of another, and any extra sign (when the number of signs that make up the word is odd) is positions at the center of the bottom.

Sometimes more complex syllables were spelled out using a sequence of syllabograms, the first one only used for its initial sound, the next one for its medial sound, and the last one for its final sound.

NOTE: In the transcription of compound signs, the period is used to separate the sound of one sign from another's.

Logograms can stand in for a syllabogram. (This process is called rebus and is found through the world's writing systems.) For example, the word for 'five' is /tau/, and 'hare' is /taula/. The written form of /taula/ is comprised of a logogram for 'five', /tau/ followed by two signs (syllabograms?) that represent /l/ and /a/.

The Khitan state fell at 1125 CE, but the two scripts continued to be used until 1191. Eventually part of the Khitan system was adopted into the Jurchen script.