10 Facts About Sawndip

Zhuang characters or Sawndip are logograms derived from Chinese characters and used by the Zhuang people of Guangxi and Yunnan provinces in China to write the Zhuang languages for more than one thousand years.

Sawndip is made up of a combination of Chinese characters, Chinese-like characters, and other symbols.

Some scholars say Sawndip started in the Han dynasty and note the occurrence on words of Zhuang origin in ancient Chinese dictionaries such as ? which is Sawndip for the Zhuang "vaiz" and in section 19 of Erya is given as having similar pronunciation and means ? .

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 been interpreted as being Thai, Dong and Cham.

One of these is the Sawndip character consisting of ?? over ? for naz, "paddy field".

Related searches

Whilst 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.

Over one thousand Sawndip characters were included in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F block that was added to Unicode 10.

Over one thousand years the Zhuang have used Sawndip to write a wide variety of literature, including folk songs, operas, poems, scriptures, letters, contract, and court documents.

One of the first systematic studies of Sawndip that covered more than one location was Zhang Yuansheng's 1984 examination of 1114 Sawndip, mainly from Wuming but including some characters from 37 other locations.

Sawndip found that regional variations in the script often did not correlate with dialect groups, which he attributes to importation of characters from other regions, as well as subsequent sound change.