Jurchen script

Jurchen script was the writing system of Jurchen people. Afraid^{[citations needed]} that the popularity of Chinese language and writing would blur their distinct identity, the Jurchen people of the 12th century devised their own script. It was derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Chinese (Han characters), the script has only been decoded to a small extent.

The Jurchens were the ancestors of the Manchu people and spoke the same language. The Jurchen script is not ancestral to the Manchu script.

According to the Sino-Jurchen glossary, the Jurchen script contains 720 characters - a mixture of logograms, which represent whole words without any phonetic element, and phonograms, which represent sounds. Compound words consisting of two or more characters were also used.

The Jurchen characters have a system of radicals similar to Chinese characters and are ordered according to radical and stroke count.

[edit] External links

• Jurchen Script

The Jurchen language and Script Website(Chinese Traditional Big5 code page) via Internet Archive

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