Sawndip
Sawndip are Chinese characters used to write the Zhuang languages in the Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan. Sawndip is a Zhuang word that means "immature characters". The Zhuang word for Chinese characters used in the Chinese languages is sawgun ; gun is the Zhuang term for the Han Chinese. Even now, in traditional and less formal domains, Sawndip is more often used than alphabetical scripts.
Names
Sawndip is also called old Zhuang script, usually used to distinguish it from the Latin-based Standard Zhuang. In Standard Chinese, the old Zhuang script is called Gu Zhuangzi or Fangkuai Zhuangzi.Sawndip and its synonyms can be used with a spectrum of narrow to broad meanings. The narrowest meaning confines its use just to characters created by Zhuang to write Zhuang and excludes existing Chinese characters. At its broadest, it includes all the "square" characters used to write Zhuang regardless of whether they are of Chinese or Zhuang origin. However, it is not always possible to determine the origin of a character. In this article the inclusive broader meaning is usually used.
In Chinese, while usually old Zhuang script and square Zhuang script are synonymous, when used contrastively, the former is restricted to those characters used before the founding of the Republic of China in 1911.
Characteristics
Sawndip is made up of a combination of Chinese characters, Chinese-like characters, and other symbols. Like Chinese it can be written horizontally from left to right, or vertically from top to bottom. The script has never been standardized; some morphosyllables have more than a dozen associated variant glyphs. According to Zhang Yuansheng, characters not also used in Chinese usually make up about 20% of Sawndip texts, although some texts may be composed almost entirely of characters also used in Chinese.Classification
Different scholars categorize Sawndip in slightly different ways. Displayed below is the estimated frequency of different types of characters by Holm:| Mode of reading | Number | Percentage |
| Phonetic | 2303 | 71.3% |
| Semantic | 78 | 2.4% |
| Phono-semantic | 40 | 1.2% |
| Chinese loan | 708 | 21.9% |
| Zhuang | 97 | 3.0% |
| Dubious | 5 | 0.2% |
| Total | 3231 | 100% |
According to Bauer, Sawndip characters can be categorized using a more complex system than the six traditional classification principles:
- Symbols that do not resemble Chinese characters, and are borrowed from non-Chinese writing systems such as the Latin alphabet and Burmese
- Non-standard Chinese-like characters created as ideographic compounds
- Non-standard Chinese-like characters created as phono-semantic compounds
- *Example: bya 'mountain' is often written as, containing the ideographic in conjunction with phonetic 巴.
- *Example: vunz 'person' is often written as, containing the ideographic radical in conjunction with phonetic 云.
- Standard Chinese characters borrowed solely for their pronunciations, and do not share the same original meaning in Chinese
- *Example: miz 'to have' is often written as, a character that is pronounced in Mandarin Chinese as, but which means 'eyebrow'.
- Non-standard Chinese-like characters created specifically for Zhuang to indicate the meaning of certain morphosyllables
- Standard Chinese characters representing loanwords or etymologically related morphosyllables from Chinese
- *Example: boi 'cup' is written as, a variant character of 杯.
- Standard Chinese characters borrowed solely for their meanings and do not have a matching reading in Zhuang with Chinese
- New characters made by juxtaposing a pair of Chinese characters that "spell out" the pronunciation of the Zhuang word as in the traditional Chinese fanqie system, with one character representing the initial consonant and the other the rest of the syllable.
History
Early vernacular characters
Even before the Tang dynasty, Zhuang or closely related languages were written down using characters that were either Chinese or made up of Chinese components. Whether these are viewed as Sawndip, or as some sort of precursor to Sawndip, depends not only the evidence itself, but also differing views of what counts as Sawndip and from what era the term Zhuang can be applied.Some scholars say Sawndip started in the Han dynasty and note the occurrence on words of Zhuang origin in ancient Chinese dictionaries such as 犩 which is Sawndip for Zhuang vaiz and in section 19 of the Erya is given as having similar pronunciation and means 牛.
There are some similarities in the poetical style of "The Song of the Yue boatman" from 528 BC and the Zhuang "Fwen" style. Wei Qingwen has interpreted the song by reading the characters as Zhuang and some consider the written version and other such songs to be a forerunner though not an example of Sawndip, it has also been interpreted as being Thai, Dong and Cham.
Tang dynasty (7th–9th centuries)
The fact that Zhuang readings of borrowed Chinese characters often match Early Middle Chinese suggests a Sui–Tang date, however it has been noted these could also be explained as later borrowings from conservative Pinghua varieties. Chinese characters were already in use in the Zhuang area, as illustrated by two Tang dynasty steles entitled in 682 and in 697. Although these are written in Chinese, the latter contains a number of non-standard characters. One of these is the Sawndip character consisting of '' over for naz 'paddy field'.Song dynasty (10th–13th centuries)
Several Song dynasty Han Chinese authors give examples of used in Guangxi such as Zhou Qufei in Lingwai Daida and Fan Chengda in the Guihai yuheng zhi saying that such characters were common in the area and used in legal documents such as indictments, complaints, receipts and contracts.Table of characters noted in the Song dynasty Guihai yuheng zhi and also in 1986 Sawndip dictionary:
| Sawndip | ? | 䦟 | ? | 仦 | ? |
| Zhuang | daemq, gaenq | onj, vaenj | onj, vaenj | neux | dah |
| English | short | steady | steady | weak | used addressing a lady |
Ming dynasty (14th–17th centuries)
Whilst no manuscripts from the Ming dynasty have been found, dozens of classic Sawndip works that survive to this day were first written during this dynasty or earlier. Some consider this to be the most abundant period of Sawndip literature. Exact dating is difficult in part because some songs were composed and transmitted orally before being written down, such as Fwen Ciengzyeingz, which Liang Tingwang has stated whilst containing some content comes from centuries before that was written down during the Ming dynasty. Similarly "Songs of March", "Songs of the Daytime", "Songs of the Road", and "Songs of House Building" where first created between the Tang and Song dynasties or earlier and certainly written down at latest during the Ming dynasty.Some songs were both created and written down during the Ming dynasty. Fwen Caeg "Songs of War" from Pingguo which is considered to be such despite some lines which are later additions. Fwen nganx 欢?, a love story, is also from the Ming era.
A number of songs written in Sawndip are stories which are originally of Han origin but for hundreds of years have been part of the Zhuang tradition, such as ?唐皇 Fwen Dangzvuengz about Li Dan and ?英台 Fwen Yinghdaiz and ?文隆 Fwen Vwnzlungz to name but a few are reckoned to have first been written down in Sawndip during the Ming dynasty or earlier. In the case of Fwen Vwnzlungz, the original Han story itself has been lost.
Qing dynasty (mid-17th–19th centuries)
Thousands of Sawndip manuscripts from the Qing period survive to this day. One well known old surviving text is the Yuefeng book of folksongs from Guiping, published in the 18th century. A book entitled Taiping Spring that contains a number of songs and is kept in Lingyun is dated as 1682.Another source is the Huayu yiyu compiled by the Bureau of Translators in the mid-18th century on the order of the Qianlong Emperor, and now held in the archives of the Imperial Palace Museum. The survey of western Guangxi was less thorough than other parts of the empire, consisting of just 71 to 170 items from three locations. Each entry consists of a Zhuang word written in the Zhuang script, with its pronunciation and meaning given in Chinese. It demonstrates both the wide use and lack of standardization of Sawndip.
Modern era (20th–21st centuries)
While after the introduction of an official alphabet-based script in 1957, Sawndip have seldom been used in some formal domains such as newspapers, laws and official documents, they continue to be used in less formal domains such as writing songs, and personal notes and messages.After the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, communist revolutionary propaganda was written using sawndip. In 1957 an official romanized Zhuang script was introduced. However, there are major phonetic and lexical differences between Zhuang dialects, and the Latin-based system is based on the Wuming dialect. Because of this and other reasons, there still are many Zhuang speakers that prefer to write Zhuang using sawndip. Even though it is not the official script at grassroots level various departments have continued to use Sawndip on occasions to get their message across. Coming into the 21st century, Sawndip understanding and usage of Sawndip remains significant: of those surveyed in two dialect areas, just over one third said that they understood Sawndip, and about one in ten that they use Sawndip in most domains. These rates are approximately twice those for the romanized script: with only one-sixth saying they understood it, and only one in twenty saying they used it in most domains.
After five years in preparation, the Sawndip Sawdenj was published in 1989 with 4,900 entries and over 10,000 characters, and is the first and only dictionary of Zhuang characters published to date. In 2008 it was announced that work was to begin on a new dictionary called The Large Chinese Dictionary of Ancient Zhuang Characters. In 2012 an enlarged facsimile of the 1989 dictionary was published with a different cover.