Re: CHAT: Parallelism

On Sat, 12 Jun 1999, Dr.X wrote:

> Has anyone given any thought as to how to construct a parallel language?
>
Ksenia Borisovna Keping has: she's a Russian authority on Tangut or
Xiaxia, an interesting Tibeto-Burman language once spoken on the eastern
borders of China, with a curious script of their own - derived from
the Chinese script, but constructed y one man, and thus quite logical,
compared to organic growths like the Chinese script.

Her theory is - and I don't deny that it sounds like a crackpot theory -
that every single bit of Tangut writing has two meanings at the same time,
and in parallel. So, when you're reading an old Buddhist legend, you're at
the same time also reading a secret history of the Tangut empire. Every
word has two simultaneous meanings, one plain, one secret. I've heard
her presenting a paper on the subject, and she was able to make it very
believable, and the undeniable fact is that she's _the_ authority on
Tangut (in no small way due to the fact that most Tangut manuscripts have
been filched by a Russian explorer, and taken to St. Petersburg).
However, she doesn't make clear whether she thinks that every Tangut
word has two meanings, plain and secret, or that every Tangut character
has two meanings - she seemed to waver between the two, at least in 1996.

Of course, her theory would be more acceptable if it also included the
theory that Tangut was a constructed language, but that's not the case -
she hasn't yet been touched by the current fashion of declaring every
pre-modern literary language a mere constructed language.

There have appeared several interesting articles by her hand in
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, and a _very_ good grammar,
so good in fact that I learnt Russian in order to be able to read it,
when I was still at University. The grammar is very much from before
her double-language theory.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt