Roger Blench: Sui scripts

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Sui is a Daic language of the Kam-Sui branch. The Sui people live in Sandu County of Guizhou Province, China. There are an estimated 300,000 speakers. The cover image to the right shows a dictionary published in 2003. Apart from the spoken language, there are two known ways of writing the language. One is essentially Chinese characters, adapted to write Sui. The second, and apparently more widespread, is a character set, le¹ sui³, with some 500 characters, of unknown antiquity. These are used principally to write calendars and record shamanistic chants. This page shows some images of the Chinese script documents in the Yunnan Minorities Museum, and some pages from Sui documents in private hands. I hope to provide complete scans as time permits.

 

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Chinese characters

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Sui characters

 

 

Ms 1

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Ms 2

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Ms 3

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