2.The unique etymological value

Xia Nai,a famous Chinese archaeologist,points out,in The Origins of the Chinese Civilization,that there are three marks of civilization: a writing system,cities and bronze tools.The use of a writing system is the most important according to Xia.The oldest six independently-developed areas of civilization in the world are Egypt,Mesopotamia(the Tigris and Euphrates river valley),India,China,Mexico and Peru.Relatively old writing systems include Egyptian hieroglyphics,Mesopotamian cuneiform,Indian phonetic letters,Chinese characters and Mayan characters.

There are fifty-six officially recognized nationalities in China.In addition to the Chinese characters(Hanzi)of Han people,a lot of nationalities have their own writing systems.There are three origins of these minority writing systems: one is borrowing and modifying Chinese characters,such as the Xixia and the Qidian character systems.The second type of writing system includes those influenced by Indian Buddhist culture and ancient Sanskrit and Pali scripts,such as the Tibetan writing system,the ’Phags-pa(Basiba)Mongolian script,and the Kucha(Kuche or Guizi)script.The third type includes those scrips created by the nationality itself,such as the Ersu Xibo(Ersushaba)script and the Dongba Naxi pictogram script,etc.

The Zhuang nationality descends from an ancient people known to Chinese history books as the Yue who lived in the south of China.Some scholars think that the ancient Yue people may have developed their own characters very early.In as early as the late 1980s,a young anthropologist named Deng Xiaohua at Xiamen University wrote,in his book Anthroplogical and Cultural Linguistics,

The ancient Yue people have their writing system.For example,some characters on pottery shards unearthed at Wucheng in Jiangxi Province are obviously like those of the ancient oracle bones [on which the earliest Chinese characters can be found].Some are different,and some occur repeatedly.The characters for the numerals one through eight are identical to those characters on pottery shards from different periods.Compared with the pottery shards originating from the Central Plain of China,where there are more recognizable characters than unrecognizable,there are fewer recognizable characters in the southern ancient Yue pottery shard characters and they are clearly quite different from those pottery shard characters of the Central Plain.There are two reasons for this: one is that both are influenced by the ancient Shang culture,but culture transmission speeds differ with regions.At the time when mature Han characters are already being painted on pottery in the Central Plain,the older style is being used in southeastern coastal areas and is,as yet,less influenced by the mature Han characters.The other reason is that the indigenous people’s cultural distinctives,and therefore vocabular and writings,differ from those of the peoples of the Central Plain,and therefore neither today’s Chinese characters nor the oracle bone era characters can be directly compared to these ancient Yue characters.Some ethnic minority writing systems may remain in an immature state for a long period,such as the Dongba orthography used by the Naxi nationality of Yunnan,in which pictures are combined with symbols,which,when combined to form sentences,do not directly represent certain necessary words which must be supplied by the reader from context when reading the script.According to philological theory,“picture characters,or pictograms,were finally formed in the New Stone Age”.The origin of the ancient Yue characters matches closely the emergence of ancient pottery engraving.The ancient pottery engravings demonstrate that Yue people were skilled in using geometrical design although their characters are simple combinations of lines and dots.The Yue people’s custom of tattooing is also connected with the emergence of their characters,a reflection of the people’s familiarity with geometric designs… the tattooing of the Li people [of Hainan] features designs but also some geometric symbols used as markers to distinguish the so-tattooed individuals from other people.Once such symbols become regularly connected with specific words in the language in a fixed manner,one has the beginnings of a writing system.

The discovery of the Poya song symbols proves the view that the ancient Yue people had their own language system.

By looking at the original manuscript of the Poya folksongs in light of the theories of philologists,we make a preliminary determination that these should be considered a type of picture writing system in its primitive period,created by Zhuang people in response to the requirements of their culture and daily life.The Poya folksong scroll is like picture book or cartoon strip in that it is intended to be read in a certain order,but one in which each picture indicates a song,or a group of songs,and the linear sequence of the symbols ensures the correct progression of the semantic contents that the symbols represent.The drawings are in the form of simple line drawings,with the meaning of each symbol being communicated mainly via the shapes drawn,thus pictographic,occasionally supplemented by ideographic features.From the point of view of the text type,they qualify as“symbol-chapter-ideogram”characters.They cannot be used to represent the language’s syntax or grammar in a written form without oral explanation.Of the present eighty-one characters,the majority of them consists of a single drawing,with only twelve(12%)combining two drawings.The shapes of the drawings can be rendered large or small,but they are not designed to be compact and stylized.They can’t be used to record the written language in terms of specific words,word order,etc.Rather they are used to aid singers in remembering lyrics.In practice,the symbols are mainly used by singers,especially by women singers,to transmit and sing folksongs.

In terms of their form,the Poya symbols,along with the Sui nationality symbols used in their Book of Sui,and the Naxi Dongba characters all belong to the pictogram type,but compared with these systems,the Poya symbols have a unique value in terms of the study of the origins of scripts and cultural heritage transmission.

First,philologists state that it is hard to separate the foundation of religion from the foundation of its related writing system.Primitive writing systems were closely connected with witchcraft and primitive religions depended on primitive pictures to record their doctrines.Such is the case with the Naxi nationality’s Dongba writing system and the Book of Sui of the Sui nationality,and even the relative mature oracle bone inscriptions are closely related to primitive divination.By contrast,the symbols used for the Poya folksongs were created only for recording Zhuang folksongs,which is completely unique in the history of the development of the world’s writing systems and transmission of culture.

Secondly,the symbols used in ideograms are basically icons.Some of them are icons which communicate meaning explicitly,that is,whose meaning can be understood from their shapes; while others are symbols that communicate their meaning implicitly,whose meaning cannot be determined solely from their shapes,but by means of learned cultural associations.Regardless whether they be explicit or implicit icons,the symbols used in ideographic writing systems are often combined with one another to communicate a story or a religious doctrine.These individual symbols or characters cannot represent an entire paragraph,but must be combined with others.For example,the scriptures written in the Dongba script are in the style of a picture book,in which a book includes many pictures,with each picture being a discreet unit to be read,with each picture including up to a dozen or more different symbols.These symbols normally cannot be read alone if separated out from each other,nor do they express a complete meaning,but only can be read and understood in combination with each other.The eighty-one symbols discovered in Poya are fixed sequence of symbols with each representing a complete folksong.Separated out on its own,each symbol stands for a single folksong.Obviously,it is more developed than the Dongba symbols because each symbol is able to express an entire paragraph and thus it is a reading unit.In terms of studying the origins of writing systems,the Poya folksongs’ symbols are indeed the fruit of a well-developed Zhuang folksong culture.This poses a challenge to the assumption that all pictographic writing systems were formed in the New Stone Age Period.

Thirdly,the original goal of ideographic writing systems is believed to aid with memorization(recording meaning),and not to create a written literary standard(written-down speech).A common feature of ideographic systems is that it cannot directly write down the language or speech as the people speak it,so the writing system must be learned by rote,and must be complemented by training from initiated teachers,oral explanations,associations of one symbol with another.In other words,in ideographic systems,the shape is the picturebased symbol,and the meaning is implied via the language unit(usually a morpheme or word)that must be recalled from memory.The bridge between the shape and the meaning must be supplied by memorized associations.The more associations implied by the shape of the character,the more that character can aid the memory in recalling its meaning.However,in the Poya symbols,the association between the form and the meaning of the symbols is provided by the imagery in the songs themselves.Expression through this type of imagery is known in study of folk ballads as Bi Xing,taking its name from the Chinese word Bi for“compare”or“metaphor”and Qi Xing meaning to“allude to indirectly”.This type of poetry alludes to its main topic by first introducing a seemingly unrelated image and then using that to allude to the main topic and by making extensive use of symbolism and through the symbolism,hinting at the subject implicitly but sometimes indirectly.This type of poetry also relies upon identifying similarities between seemingly dissimilar things and makes symbols out of concrete objects to communicate meaning and emotion.Certain images are used to suggest certain themes which are hinted at before they are made explicit.Many of the images are common to the people’s daily life and thus are easily associated with the daily life context and emotions of the people.The Poya folksong symbols help the Zhuang singers as a“memory aid”in remembering their folksongs by drawings that make use of symbolism,hints and cultural associations to communicate.

It should be noted that in the several songs quoted above as examples,besides the allusions and symbolic imagery,the content of the song also must be consistent with image representing it in the song scroll.Though the sequential ordering of the antiphonal singing of the songs is fixed,the specific number of words and sentences in each song is not actually fixed but varies according to the particular singer’s singing and performing ability.This phenomenon of“surpassing a strict relationship to the language”is commonly seen in ideographic writing systems.All in all,the Poya song drawings fit very well with this kind of Bi Xing poetry.The combination of symbols and Bi Xing style folksongs represents a unique example whose academic research value is immeasurable.

Through the research summarized above,the unique value of the Poya folksongs and their symbols for philology and the transmission of culture has been recognized.The Poya drawings have been used to record Zhuang folksongs by local people with less education,primarily by women who have not become literate in Chinese characters.In conclusion,these songs and symbols represent an invitation to philologists and ethnologists now and in the future to work together and continue this research.