History is fickle. Your people could sweep
across the steppes centuries before the Mongols. You could build a great literate empire. We
can know so much about you, the life story of who was first and who last. China itself
can write official texts about you. Yet it's no guarantee, after all that work, that your
language still won't be lost! This is the story of Khitan, a language just now being
recovered and possibly your next chance at full decipherment. It's 907, the final year of the Tang dynasty.
To the north, a band of nomads is on the rise. They've been giving China trouble for years.
After shrewd fighting and diplomacy, a leader emerges from among them to become the Great
Khan. They expand, ride west, take over what is today Mongolia, and spread across northern
China, east to Korea. They make Beijing their southern capital and leave the earliest tall
pagodas that still stand in that city. It may sound like a familiar story, but the
actors may not be who you think they are. We're witnessing the rise of what goes down
in Chinese history as the the Liao Dynasty. These are the Khitan people, and their leader,
from the Yarud clan, is Abaoji. After crafting a state, Abaoji turns to the
next urgent matter: branding. We need writing! He takes this task seriously and in 920 announces
a new script inspired by Chinese characters. His younger brother though struggles with
it. More inspired by the Uyghurs he has met, he invents another script in 925. Both become
official, spread around the empire and dominate for centuries. Writing outlasts empire; the
later Jīn Dynasty recognizes Khitan alongside Jurchen, and the emperor himself goes on record
proclaiming, "The new Jurchen script cannot match it." Despite the strong start, the endorsements
and the hype, it was not to last. After over three centuries, the written language vanishes
from the records. Just as we know who started it and when, we may also know the story of
its last writer. This man, with a long beard down to his waist, is Chucai from the same
Yarud family. This Khitan sage serves the Jin Dynasty until they're conquered by the
Mongols. He is taken in by Chinggis Khan and advocates for evenhanded rule of conquered
peoples. "You can take over the whole world on horseback, but you can't rule it from horseback."
He dies inside the capital of the Mongol Empire in 1244. It's a great story of this vast literate Khitan
people for 300 years. There's just one problem, maybe two: evidence is scant, and recalcitrant. In fact, before 1900, Chinese scholars only
knew of one example. This is a rubbing made of that stone inscription. It's old China
so we read top to bottom, right to left. On one side is Khitan. On the other, perfectly
readable Chinese characters. This is still the sole bilingual text, and so if we're lucky,
a Khitan Rosetta Stone. Slowly throughout the 20th century, more examples
were confidently identified. They are short and full of names and dates: epitaphs, a sarcophagus,
seals, this bronze mirror... (No, this isn't Etruscan!) We end up with a catalogue of merely
precious lines, not books. And then someone at the Kyrgyz Academy of
Sciences got a hold of this. One whole book, abstrusely named Nova N 176. It made its way
to Leningrad, where it went unidentified for 60 years until it was recognized as Khitan
in 2010. It gives the impression of Chinese characters,
until you look closer. Not quite right, not right at all. Beneath the surface, it's a
totally different system. In 1985, a team made the first guesses as
to what that system was. Starting with Chinese words and names transcribed into Khitan, they
carefully read those sounds into the rest of the texts and were able to give 25% of
them reluctant readings. But immense hurdles prevented further breakthroughs. There really
were two scripts here: large and small. Apart from some logograms, symbols for whole words, neither
script is like Chinese. Worse, between the small and the large themselves, there's
zero overlap. To read Khitan fully, you have to crack two systems. Research unfolded slowly over the decades.
Here's what was learned. The large characters are many in number, several hundred to a thousand.
They are written one after another. It seemed like each one must represent a logogram, a
whole pronunciation-meaning bundle: a state is "gur". But it has become clearer and clearer that they stand for syllables: this may write "gur" whether alone or inside another word containing
that same syllable. By the turn of the 21st century, you could list down the readable symbols on
barely a couple pages. Since then, epitaphs discovered this century have given decipherers
more symbols and more contexts to guess at. The Khitan small script is a different story.
It's the one you see in that famous bilingual inscription. Characters are written in word
blocks. They include a healthy number of logograms, but focus on the way sounds are handled. This
block contains a symbol representing an initial consonant g-. Then a separate symbol gives us
the final rhyme -ur. These two components are reusable pieces in any text to write the
sounds ur and g. It's possible that consonants contain an inherent
vowel, since they're sometimes used as a whole syllable: this character is used to write
just b in b-as, but the whole syllable bo in tai-bo. Altogether, the small script flexibly
writes with a range of consonant, vowel and consonant-vowel pairs. Less syllables, more
combinable sequences, in or across syllables. Which leaves us a sense for the sounds. For example,
it contrasts p-t-k with b-d-g. But was this with voicing, /pa/ versus /ba/, or like Mandarin
aspirated /pʰa/ versus /pa/? In addition to an n-sound, it has a palatal /ɲ/. Oh,
and vowels play a big role, harmonizing between words and endings. So Khitan has suffixes
for cases like this genitive -en: gur-en "of the state". But that's if the word ends in
a consonant. If it's in a vowel, the suffix matches the vowel! Evidence gets complex. Take this word: ka.ga.an.
It's the genitive of Khan, so "of the Khan". Now consider that this glyph is not used to
transcribe Chinese k, nor is this one used for Chinese g. Comparing them across texts,
it doesn't look like they are variants of k or g. They could represent distinct sounds,
maybe back-k /q/ and fricative /ɣ/, like this: ['qaɣaan]. The grammar of the language is appearing slowly
from these texts: noun plurals and cases, past tense verb endings. Over 800 years ago,
Khitan was un-Chinese (and really un-English) enough it made this earwitness laugh to hear
that instead of "a bird sits on a tree in the middle of a pond", the Khitad say "water
bottom in tree on bird sits". Suffixes and a verb at the end. If that already reminds you of another language, we'll come back to you in a second. Everything is delicate, needs testing. But
can we take what we've learned and apply it to that enticing book, a book that singlehandedly
doubles the character count for the large script? So far, only the barest bits emerge
from this frustratingly unique cursive handwriting. Pages into the text it records a year 1045
and the name of the "Great Middle... something... Khitan State". If we've put it together correctly, and if
these symbols sound like we think they do, the tentative words revealed within all of these
texts bring up one big mystery to solve. Just what is this language? Well, the old
Liao history, the Chinese account of the Khitan Empire, has a vocabulary list attached to it with some
forty basic words. Several resembe Mongolian. Add in deciphered words, and many see a language
kind of like Mongol. "Kind of" is important here. Mongolic is a
family of languages. Khitan wouldn't fit neatly among the languages as a sibling. But one
prominent explanation puts Khitan not under but alongside Mongolic as a parallel branch
on a much larger tree: a Para-Mongolic language. So where did they go? One possible link is
Dagur, is a Mongolic language but one where up to a fifth of the words don't come from
Mongol nor from other known surrounding languages. We're in the realm of guesses that are more
or less educated. Khitan words are obscure, despite huge attempts to understand what remains.
We're just beginning to unvanish the words of this civilization who set the stage for
the rise of great empires in its wake and for centuries wrote its own history "qiduni
guren usgide", "in the writing of the Khitan State". Stick around and subscribe for language!
Dude, I was just watching this! Such an interesting video!