The decipherment of dead languages in China: the case of Kitan

I'd like to welcome you to the Australian Centre on China in the world for those of you who don't know who I am my name is Benjamin Penney I'm the director of the center and first as is customary I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and to pay respects to their elders past and present tonight is a very auspicious occasion as you know the Morrison lecture is one of the universities well in fact the unit the university's oldest continuous public lecture and indeed one of the oldest continuous public lectures in the world especially in any field to do with Asia the Morrison lecture predates the Anu the first was given in 1932 in Canberra in the building that was then known as the Institute of anatomy for those of you who are old noting Canberra resident long enough to know where that was now the so called National Film and Sound Archive but for those of us a certain age it's it's where phalates heart resided that's where it was given in the old days there were nine lectures given after after an including 1932 it stopped in 1941 with the Second World War when the ANU was founded after the war the Morrison lecture was also refounded and started again in 1948 and it has been given every year since it is officially the Morrison lecture in ethnology and it was originally funded by the Chinese community of Canberra for those of you who are interested in the history of the Morrison lecture our journal East Asian history presented reprinted the first eight of the nine first lectures before the war a few years ago with a short essay introducing the early history of the Morrison lecture the one that we didn't print is because it was not available we would have printed otherwise and some other selections of the Morrison lecture post-war were printed in an earlier edition of the East Asian history it's a very notable lecture I'm so pleased that it's continuing it is run run by a three-person committee which at the moment consists of Professor Andrew Kipnis dr. Mike strange and myself and rotates amongst there says as the kind of primary chooser of the person I'll introduce mark in a moment who will introduce our speaker tonight but I have to say that I'm really pleased that Professor Kane has agreed to give tonight's lecture Danny is one of the great scholars of the Chinese world that Australia has produced a great linguist a great historian and lovely men as well and I think it's very appropriate that he's put up this first slide and that you probably recognize that that is Danny a few years ago now but you know it's great to see that he's been you know rendered immortal in artistic works as well that's all I'll save the moment it's my pleasure now to introduce mark strange who is currently on secondment here in the Australian Centre on China in the world normally found in the school of cultural history and language and one of our great historians of pre-modern China continuing in the tradition that this university has always had to study the the pre-modern era of Chinese history we take it seriously and Mark is the latest one of the latest incarnations of that serious intent so very appropriate person who accused anything that's tonight speaker but there you go anyway good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this year's George Morrison lecture my name is Benna Soros that is Marc strange I'm a member of the new college of Asia in the Pacific and again with with them and with Andrew Kepner so I'm a honored to be a member of the organizing committee for the lecture series and it's in that capacity that I'm making this introduction tonight so as Ben has already explained this is the did you mention it's the 78th model for those of you can do the masters can be straightforward it is the 78th contribution to this extremely prestigious and long running annual lecture series the George amorous and lecture in ethnology and the association with George Morrison points up a particular concern with China but actually I'm more interested in running briefly in this introduction on the other part of the title on the focus on ethnology it's quite a long way from where I normally stand but I think by my understanding ethnology is the as the study the comparative study of cultures of different peoples and as a corollary of cultural compact please correct me if it has a misapprehension but if that is right then I think the topic of tonight's lecture an attempt to understand the Keaton people who are returned to the second in their own language is strikes me as more than usually relevant to the foundational principles of this particular lecture series with that focus on on ethnology and actually I suppose we could say that ethnology runs right through this evening from the from the acknowledgement of country right through to the topic of the lecture as we will no doubt hear in what follows the Keaton people inhabited well they from obscure origins but they're inhabited areas of Northeast Asia from about the fourth century through to the 13th century they founded the state of liao in the early 10th century and this was a policy that exerted a formative influence on successive Han Chinese states but it's only really in recent years that the extent of Kiton our influence on their hand Tiny's neighbors has really started to receive its due acknowledgement has been recognized in scholarship for how important it really was and tonight speaker has been at the forefront of Anglophone efforts in that direction as an Anglophone contributions to that vital I think Michael scholarly endeavor to better understand the Chinese world by understanding of the world of its neighbors so for the past several decades Danny Caine has been a leading authority on the Keaton language as well as on the language of another rival to medieval Han Chinese policies the Jurchens he originally comes from Melbourne but he took his PhD at the ANU in 1975 with a thesis on written language of the 12th and 13th century Qin state that research then became the basis of his 1989 monograph the sino German vocabulary of the bureau of interpreters I hear that his first acquaintance with Keaton goes back to 1970 but his book on the language and script of of Keaton published it by Braille in 2009 is without doubt the standard English language work on that subject it was described by one reviewer as quote a significant step forwards towards the goal of deciphering the Keaton language which the same reviewer suggested quote among all the undeciphered languages is probably the one which has the greater chance of what being one day fully understood that raised a slight smile in the light of the the abstract that then is supplied us so I hope that tonight's lecture may serve to put those remarks into their full and proper context also on the study of languages past and present professor Kane has written an introductory work on the history and usages of the Chinese language and it's with those research interests that he has held academic posts at the University of Melbourne at Peking University and he was professor of Chinese at Macquarie University from 1997 until his retirement but Danny Caine's interests have also long extended beyond the languages and cultures of those medieval peoples for example he's published several articles on the late Korean Imperial states variegated engagement with the international community in the 19th and into the very early 20th centuries and been rightly pointed out today there's also another kind of person the 19th National Congress of the CCP opened in Beijing yesterday as many of you will know and in the context of that event of crucial significance for the future composition of the CCP but also that the future direction of its of its policies it might be worth noting that noting professor Kane's contribution to a 1993 edited volume it was called modernization of the Chinese past the volume was called modernization of the Chinese past but his paper traced and to use its title irrational belief among the Chinese elite so we have the full spectrum from the medieval to the absolutely contemporary and relevant his observations in that paper incidentally and much else besides I suspect were based on a parallel career in diplomacy he joined the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs shortly after completing his PhD in in 19 1975 he was posted to Beijing in 1976 and later on he was also a cultural counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing in the mid-1990s so it's with that extraordinary combination of technical expertise and intellectual breadth in mind that I should like to welcome this year's Morrison lecture a lecturer Daniel came to guide us through some attempt to decipher the Keaton language and by so doing to add to our understanding of the ethnology of the Chinese world and others after that what can I say we may as all go home and talk about good old days the first few slides I prepared here I didn't quite know how it is going to pan out tonight so these are just sort of to kill time while we get ourselves organized and selling Assad so I just mentioned this fellow is the guy that I call the new boss so if you turn up on Monday morning and say guess what we've got a new boss and this guy turns up you know he is saying don't jerk mister with me you know he's a very actually it's a yeah a death mask or some important official this is just a very outline map then your capital city which is that way to achieve a better Tina it's very close to a place called cheerful in modern China it's about two hours drive away the down there somewhere you can find a nun nun Jean 19 is what we now call the the basis bonus the same place says Peking Beijing so it's very big a very big territory this one what my friends didn't like it very much but I put it there anyway because it shows you that really it was a quite a huge territory there's the CCR there's a Song Dynasty so and so and there is the new dynasty now the Leo were very particular a very strange lot they started off as Mark was saying they establish a dynasty but they first called themselves the great Keita state and then after 50 years or so they changed their name to the great liao dynasty nobody knows why and then after another 50 years again the great Tetons state again and then another 50 years something they changed a night back again this has not happened any time and trying to assist me and nobody knows why why they had this actually I changed their then their name every now and then this is just a tumor mural of what they looked like with his boots he's his clothes or what that like I said there were just a few very introductory slides to before we start the lecture as such okay I just got a couple of quotations here which is quiet and well I think the relevant assignments are by far the most glamorous achievements of scholarship there was a touch of magic about unknown writing more spoke the story suddenly sacrament of a newly discovered or perennial a mysterious text is the most glamorous aspect of the study of writing systems Daniels and right now I don't know if everybody in this one would agree that the summer the South meadow state languages was the most exciting thing you could imagine probably nobody would and certainly as a at the minority view but for people who get into this sort of stuff it really is a extremely attractive and extremely hmm what would I say under technical aerosol sector will be something you can't put down once you've got hooked up here you stay hooked for a long time I might just mention by the way we mark was talking about I should pay tribute to all my various teachers and walk up but in particular he go - Elka bolts who died about a year ago it's like the inner-city year ago when I was doing a PhD eight years ago we started talking about a Tuscan and he said oh if you're interested in the Etruscan and Chinese you might read this book pirate folklore full on history Chinese society the L and so I did and then I was born as hooked because he was an undecided language that you more or less had to know about China and Chinese to to get some sort of grass fall so if we look particularly at the Keaton script sometimes may provide for the KH and sometimes of the K by the way H is sort of considered a bit old-fashioned now sort of like Beijing and Peking so it doesn't it's the same places different spelling it is still a long way to the heart of the jungle or the Keaton writing system the writer the kid on script remains one of the most fascinating problems in the history of the Altaic world a much hard work remains to be done before we shall be able to read for instance the Keaton rymus in memory of Empress trainee the poetess who was put to death 911 years ago kara who was a Hungarian expert on Mongolian and Turkish and so on 1987 I particularly wanted to use that quotation because in the book I write in which I have a copy here I transcribed that particular inscription so even though we're not on top of it we're more top of it than we used to be but I'll explain what I mean later that is the next quotation is probably the most appropriate of all even such a famous primatologists initiator tut saw it was a obviously a japanese expert could only sigh to tell you the truth Nikita's script is becoming more and more incomprehensible things which were able to understand before we are even Miss able to understand now it's so it's like a cryptic crossword puzzle of until people you know you think you've got that corner right but then something goes wrong and the whole thing is back to square one again and a lot of attendance we to to suffocate on a very much of that at that table okay this is great minds think alike this is a quotation from yoking Antonin who mean think about the possibility of all decipherment the Keaton script remains one of the most crucial and solve problems of comparative Mongolian studies it is also one of the witches born where my dress was also one of the last two remaining scripts in the world for which the prospects were full decipherment good so everybody knows that the face stuffs which nobody can read and the InDesign I spoke which nobody can read and and so on Assad but for various reasons it's very unlikely that those scripts were ever going to be read unless something really turns up some sort of a bilingual or some sort of a dickering or something like that but at the moment Keaton looks as if it could be and should be able to be deciphered so it's just a matter going to this or keep working on it until something appears what we find when we look at other famous assignments of ancient Egyptian of Cal Poly or for example all Persian any ABI and Ventris ancient Greek man you know I think a lot of people know about these things were under suffered languages which various geniuses sorted out of the seemingly incomprehensible mists and their worked out there's a sort of pattern going on there and when it's all sorted out it turns out that in each and every one of these cases it is related to a language which is known so ancient Egyptian was related to Coptic the Mayan script was related to modern my own sort of languages all Persian was obviously related to later versions of poem and so on its own if you don't have that underlying language you're really in trouble so do we have an underlying language in the case of he done well that is one of the major questions kita and this one takes it for granted that the language is Mongolian so I wouldn't say everybody but 90% of people who work on this presume that Keaton is a form of Mongolian the problem is that you've got to prove these things and when you apply when you try to read a Mongolian inscription having them you know just a dictionary in your hand you can't make any sense of Gaulke done all using it it seems to me well not I seems to me I put forward this this year and in people saying yeah dollie so the finished I mentioned before he's very good to thinking of possible hypotheses so he came up with the idea what he calls param on garlic and param on garlic according to he's this is purely hypothesis is no food for this but the before genius can and among all the parks Mongolia's we're talking about before a fortune has come to a lot of tribes peoples means Oh in that area who spoke languages which which were in some ways sort of a bit like Mongolia which had been wiped out in due course and which have been assimilated by Mongolian or what-have-you but there's still some traces of Mongolian inside Keita and so when people say AHA inside you know in Makita language says this section looks a bit like Mungo in that selection looks like a bit like Mongolian that's where they get from but still you have to prove it but that's the concept compare my lawyer now we get down to the more interesting part most of you tonight well many of you tonight I should have said have been to to Xian and you've been to the tomb of in Perth wool and either your guidebook or your guide or what-have-you we'll take you to this very famous inscription which was called the steely without an inscription a silly little bit of a huge rock she's stoned on between inscription is written but this one definite evidence what she nodded and this had to do with Empress was you because she was a sort of a Buddhist was that by writing down a list of her achievements limits them and so by writing something down you are saying you're putting a limit to what she did so if you write nothing you are not putting any limit there so hello humans are limitless but if you happen to be there maybe on a particularly auspicious occasion you'll see that in fact there was a black blob there she normally will go you important normally will just look and say oh yeah you know what about it or move on but if you are really interested you might want to know what is this black blob and why did somebody get up and put it there what it is and you can't see it from the ground of course because it's too far up that's about three meters above the ground but if you happen to have a telescope or you know binoculars you happen to be walking around China with a telescope you can sort of baby work it up and it's not a very good way of doing it well this is indeed what the black blob is and as you can see the black this is the so-called rubbing and so somebody actually have to physically climb up the rock with some sort of scaffolding and we see black with black ink and with a little hammer up until you I make sure I get a reproduction of what is on earth and as you can see and I've got a slide there too the thing at the top don't worry too much about that there chefs the Chinese seal script but underneath that is something incomprehensible followed by something written in classical Chinese now this is the Rosetta Stone of key dance studies and why do I call rosetta stone because the rosetta stone of course was the key to understanding ancient Egyptian and Shivani I sort of worked it out and what it is I'll see if we can get a better shot over yes that's it that's what and that's a rubbing and that's essentially you know what I just showed you except that's much bigger and clearer so here we have something very strange well enough face things were very particular because if we read the Chinese with only doing so if we translate it into English which was done in recent times the first translation was in 1860 or missionaries and others it's called Wiley so you know what the Chinese means if you are China is if you're a lot of Chinese somebody will translate it for you and you know what it means and it even says there somewhere towards the end this is a translation that's a Chinese version this is a translation of what is on the right so in other words this is on the right and whatever it is it's this is a Chinese translation so this is a bilingual you know heavens gift to every this this would be the sovereign and soul you then have to do it to work out you know what corresponds to what and you've done it he said that's not the way it's worked out but I'll tell you how it was worked out and what we're going to do tonight whatever else we do is another matter that we're going to read this so this is our text what alert and that you know at the beginning of the evening which was 20 minutes ago none of us heard about mining well he'll it looks like the owner did something like that but I shall show you how we have been able to manage to work out what that means and why it means what it means and then of course it's a matter of expanding that knowledge to other inscriptions because of about 30 inscriptions in this sort of writing which is known as a key town small script okay so here we here we go in front of the term of impress well we just said that it is a bilingual in Kitano Chinese and this is what it says okay well I've got the Chinese version but it's coming up later the younger brother of the great Qin state now question number one the greatest said implies that this is Church er it's $13 C and so that'll mislead people who have God century also because they thought it was a church and I which are really mad actually is quite a different language okay so there is a birthday there the younger brother of the rage in the state campaign commander which was a title military commission I caught a mental titles but sometimes in the body area there were no matters to attend to so he was in charge of a particular area nothing much going on he was a bit bored so he went hunting to the south side of Yongsan of Melton so it's all very clear when he arrived that the tending terms of the tongue which was very impersonal was true and rather related to him nearby the halls and corridors were in a state of decay there was nothing to be seen he ordered issues for the authorities to gather work when to make repairs and this is very easy to to imagine you know here comes the Empress brother turns up the whole places in a vote or miss he calls the local magistrate he says fix it up yeah this is disgusting and so the major cities houses assessor and you know he said I'll be back and and he did he came back later dad's now he returned to visit the tombs the paintings were like new surrounding corridors gone off all sides he was in explicitly delighted he maybe was a failure and afterwards he drink wine with the prefect or Lea and returned home so you know they had a bit of a bit of a drink and then he went home again so that's what it means we thought well we're getting somewhere because you need a circuit on there's the English the question is what part of the English corresponds to what partly he [Music] and then it's got the date at the end the date was the 12th year of this Qingwei period one one three four midwinter the 14th day court - the director more of more official titles operations 180 the prefect of your Joe Longo purchase in accordance with the edict on the right it's a translation of the texts which I mentioned before tells you in plain Chinese that you know this is a translation okay so if we look at the Keaton translation I let us see how long this fares yeah it's better to you to have a quick look at this business so in Chinese I wanted him actually but here we have dodging quantity do twenty lay this is this is an official title okay official title he in place name in place now p.m. place should we be in place though okay official total so all these TW s any new Amazon or thought they're like little errors this is an official title governor-general listen official title in a Rear Admiral or whatever it may be so when you are looking for a little a little a little little gap something which you can start working on a good place to start is a good place to start if place names or personal names or something like that because they came to be you know written in for the Chinese names are with Niketan script in the South Chinese place now so when you are sort of hanging this up on your wall I've also got a hanging there and many buddies very welcome to have a look at them later you spend that you to seem to spend an awful lot of time looking at the wall when you dookied on studies you just sort of sit there thought I you know waiting for inspiration to strike and occasionally it does but anyway when you reconstruct it would obey you got great and gold and then this is after the job is already redone going kahan know yahoo shadi basically if we start off in the very beginning we can see what did this guy do he was bored he went out to hunt where did he go to hunt yeah Shawn what literally alphabet was Liang Shan start with hello hola in China's and then we look later in the term meanie in the inscription which I'll show you in a minute we say that he had a drink at the magistrate of Nijo that also as a place that which begins with L and lo and behold you've got the same sort of litter yeah so you say a litter type of hypothesis that this is look and so you go scrounge again the inscription looking for another look and you're fine tien-tung-shan name the Qinling tombs of the tang dynasty a lean tomb could be considered place name and maintain it start with ill and the next syllable him and that's interesting because the name of the official who wrote this thing at the end was called Quan Yin Shi and lo and behold it's with neem which is the saving India so you it confirms like you've got anything up there yes how do how to get this working again one Lauren five had started and one one one five is soldered and the reason the reason for this is better yeah and that's a very interesting question and it's it's not complicated but it's just a little bit deeper what's going on here and what is going on in fact is that people still prefer to variety in katana and in Aikido and swift even though it's a Jin dynasty that the Egyptians had their own script but it was very rarely used and the Jurchen upper classes had been educated in Keaton and so when they wanted to take the poetry or something they generating heat huh so even though this was doing the Qin Dynasty which was run by the Jurchens it's sort of like in English for example put them up it up assignment well 50 years ago people might put up a sign in Latin it's because that looks better it doesn't mean to say that you know we're still under an empire but that is basically a very very sharp because people that her neck was what confused people for so long because they thought it was Georgia and there was no way and scene we've got a bit of time which is not related to this just to finish off that soy by thy people thought it was in Georgian until a Bilgin priest this is a story of skullduggery so we go into it at the moment honest we have time later but anyway he happened to be nearby when business stole excavated the tomb of the scenes in Emperor in 1923 when northern China has never said chaos and when he excavated it was clearly a Ikeda thing and then people realized - hi this is the same script as the words of a script in mansi on therefore it's not Church and after all it's really Keita and that had to import consequences okay we can get back to where we were this is probably something like it sounded or what it was when we look at it why do I do great gold because in capital letters because we know what these words mean but we don't know how they were pronounced okay now some people would say oh well we'll call this a halo we'll go echo echo echo we'll call it something Mongolian looking but there's no evidence at all that the word for great anything to do with the Mongolia where for a hawk great all that the hidden word for gold but you know it means gold because it's mr. dart in convey you know the great gold Empire this was because in his region there was nothing going on at the young son at the side of it he went hunting and then so they should be a oh no I should be here anyway he went hunting and then things were he discovered that things were in the an awful mess so he called together the ignitor the hits ah who a local locally there and told him to clean it up and you can get the general idea then he came back later and everything was like new and therefore with the heads he drink some wine and then he went back home again at that time it was heaven on the Kings second fourth day it happened in the year of the tiger I here with the tiger in middle winter on the tin on the 14th day it was so even after 10 minutes or so we've got a general idea what this was all about but we haven't quite finished there this is a societal thing promoting what are the official part of the center and so on this is a Keaton text I do you see great God Gordon which probably is almost certainly as a word for state the great Qin state because the word obviously meant you know he was a younger brother of the Emperor but if you're an emperor you could be a long deal you could be a kahan you could be a car and so people just didn't know which one of all things spent many years trying to work out but eventually they worked out it really was kahan and in charge of who is another one because it's a Chinese title which means Minister war or something like this but it didn't look like anything in Chinese it wasn't until again a lot of hard work that people worked out that Choji meant war and war means in charge of in charge of war King Leo is another official title shadi which is an a a Keaton word meaning they caught a quarter a quarter tendon somebody who would have various official duties on the court because in the region and so on so this we don't have to read it but you can see the same sort I think you say here's neither again they hates other thing and here's the date and here's the the tiger and here was the mid middle and this is winter and this is fall day and it goes on and on so that is essentially a transcription or translation of that particular inscription once you get your head around that of course you can start going in different directions because you say okay we know that the word for official in charge if they doubt the heads we talked to there you know here at the painting boss but then if you look at other inscriptions cuz there were 30 odd inscriptions in this language and you say oh look there it is is here's the word which means to be in charge of something and then what happens next oh look here is a word for war now what's going on here and so you can expand you know you've started you've got a little bit of a grasp on what's going on and the more then you move into other practically now whenever people discover a an inscription they finds something new you know that you know maybe it's only one thing maybe it's more than one thing but there's a little bit of progress every time except the progress is very very small now this particular type of script that we've been looking at is called the Keaton's small script and why is it called the Keaton small script you may ask because the Keaton's also had to of not only two or Hart who main titles but they had to sort of scripts and this is really very strange because why would anybody in been to Swift's so I've got a little quotation here when we look at the last quickly when the import came to I think he'd been on the 20 15 years of something and he he called together he ordered again a group of Chinese literature knees to create a script for the keydown language and so the Chinese took Chinese characters and took them apart and re put them back together again and you see sometimes some modern Chinese poets do this sort of thing they get a you know characters and they sort of have you know different radicals at different phonetics of a anyway the kittens were going in a thousand a thousand years ago but then according to the soy in the history of our dynasty and one has to be very careful the history dynasty because it was compiled two hundred years after the fall of Italy ow and also it was based on particularly know material so offering of people so according to the Odyssey such-and-such except you had to be very careful when you're using the Liao dynasty but getting back a minute early there's a second script the hair we already had a script and five years later and we had to believe they know history here we have this [Music] what do you heard this in scripture where messages came to the court that there was no one who can understand their language the Empress said to tear tear title thiele who was his brother was clever he may be sent to welcome them by being in the company for 20 days he may be able to learn their spoken language and script I repeat he was with her for 20 days and he learnt this book and I was in script eat your heart out would be would be modern scholars of obscure languages well like token a there's a great quotation about pili or there wasn't meant to be funny but I found a funny that when he was looting you know doing Hall and so on he got caught in cash cow supplies because his luggage was somewhere and so in his obituary or whatever I'd said that Paleo learned a scurvy Turkic while he was waiting for his luggage oh yeah I've got 20 minutes here so you have these wonderful stories Rath Lemus he then created a number of smaller Catan characters which were few in number fewer in number of human number covered everything generally accepted date 925 that is required to believe there's just five years later but it is more than a century before the earliest extant inscription so in other words we've got a soy daddy in 925 he went and learned we're here in 20 days sounds like one of these books you find the file name which bookshop is that you know makes in a month or well shall we go we're at afford that or whatever it was so there's some sort of a problem going on here because the question is why would they do it if you've already caught a script but then somebody comes along with a much easier script why would you want to keep two of them you one would normally think that you'd use a simpler script which has about 400 so probably somewhat this 380 characters end because it's very easy to learn welcome part of this week and the three easy to write and so on and so on but the China but the key dance still maintained the earlier script and use both of them so in the truths but throughout the dynasty but on the end of the dynasty they use both scripts and I'll give you an example of what both scripts look like and you say they don't really look anything like each other all they will look vaguely Chinese but they're very yeah okay this is very elegant just an example of something to say this is an educator small script a bronze mirror you can see it's really a Germany elegant sort of script was written normally in this order quasi seen some sort of the first imperial script I assist as the one I was killing your mentioning about the the discovery or at one time this was the only inscription of people had of any sort of Keita then this priest came along and he found one inscription at the bottom of a grave and the reason the peasants haven't stolen it was too bloody heavy but you know they worked off everything they could find but you know a couple of tons of stuffy and some language not particularly hardly worth the trouble you know he turned up with a whole lot of people who had who made a and he had them dangling by ropes all over the the grave which was a couple of meters down and none of them knew how to make rubbings so they had to copy it and all of you of course we tried to copy things in languages which you don't know very well so you tend to get them wrong and anyway a comma then I but it was something at least and then afterwards the son of a sort of a warlord a military commission or something also looted some royal tombs and put them in his garden sorta like garden gnomes or something like this but their bench we found their way into museums and so on in China so by the thirties now by the forty so we say forties fifties the Chinese had five fairly substantial inscriptions that's the two for the Empress in English and not in English in Chinese in Kedah and two others for the Empress and this one now there's something which I wasn't going to mention love one of my friends who was looking at this said oh you know a bit of historical what human sort of what would I say addition because well I did she do this because it was a good deal of bad blood going on between this particular priest that are the priests and then this one bought this but then he sold to somebody else on that went on and on but to something else which was very quite interesting about the Cultural Revolution every state coalition great over at all but it did have its rather interesting aspects and one was towards the end of the Cultural Revolution and of the intellectuals law officers were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants and so on azad so they basically had nothing to do so sweet people we mean a Mongolian to people in Peking use their time to make up little snips of the Keaton screw acute on the inscriptions so sip sort they are they sort of bits of paper so he would say you know it's it's this particular he done later and it appeals you know before this one and after that one on bah-bah-bah and this took something like three or four years nowadays I would take a computer you know three minutes or something but this is how they start doing it because they had nothing to do except amuse themselves so think he has a coach Revolution had certain advantages for them anyway when they after the coach revolution in those days is a bit complicated because you may remember those of you who are around at the time was that everything was done collectively so if this was written by ABCDE it was say it was written by so-and-so collectively so you never did quite sure who done what said now you can work out because people who I didn't even wants and so on and so on in any case in 1985 was a second major breakthrough in in the kid on script which is seeing their ivory construction creator of the ketone syllables now this is quite interesting something I've found that when you're looking at a syllabic scoot because we didn't have time to go into it but this is not a alphabetic script that's syllabic you know I'm pretty sure that if you look at the interests and an assortment of any evade you find that he invented the idea of a agreed it for himself I'm pretty sure he didn't know anything about Japanese but it includes a really quite important for this sort of language and I think I hope the next one yeah I didn't write this something copied something that I did but doesn't matter you can say his eye he also you've got three years and three years and here but I but here you've got four missing and here you've got six machine with he you've got a certain intimacy now what you would expect of what they the linguistical comparative was a call about or something that all of these would be have something written in them so there were still quite a few characters that we don't know what they are but there's a fair bit that they fit into one of these categories here just that we haven't quite worked out what particular as a whole or particular little square there they're into now this is from the tomb of the first emperor and again if you just okay salary a Chinese but then when you look at it you say well yeah sort of Chinese but that's general it appears to be job but this is what could be trouble and this oh gosh you must miss something and that looks like one but with a beating you know what this looks like chewing but it doesn't have a line so it it has a so although it looks very much like Chinese characters but different so this is the large script this is the script that the Chinese invented for them I mean read it for the Emperor as much as we can here this is arraignment of the last script and now of course because of different reasons of the Chinese government partly acted Chinese archaeological departments explore open Imperial tumors so even though they can explore around the terms in front of the terms of the side of the terms peripheral terms all sorts of terms they can't actually get inside the Imperial terms themselves so war most of the inside the Imperial turns to be lots of other lots of other inscriptions written in Quito but we can't get hold of them at the moment and they've tried all sorts I think it's now this is a much bigger example of the large script and again if we look at it with our you Chinese for those of you know Chinese you see this critically there are some things which look as if they might be Chinese or which are Chinese but they don't make you assess so like I can't push but you can see them for yourself or you it son looks like a young meaning to but it doesn't have the line top this one we don't know what it is this woman's country but if I'm gonna go tell her this one is the one which we just saw that's my 20s like the word for spring except that's got a fire instead of a you know the four three lines again the next one that something looks like ill my brother even if you put all that together still doesn't make the slightest bit of sense so those if you were Chinese your first to reaction upon the hill a Chinese I think you look at it more carefully and you say huh whatever it is it's sort of pretty weird Chinese and then the next thing you're saying no it's not Chinese but it looks like Chinese anyway that's an odd script and then this is the small script which you can see is quite a different kettle of fish this is a lot of script again it's what looks mainly Chinese but you can see that each character is made up of a certain number of smaller characters so that one has got four and one of the god or the well it's got two that when I've got fire that when I've got two that one I thought why not when I got to these are syllables some other words a script as a celebrity script which means this is why it is much easier to work it out because once you work out like this is I for example which can either my father or it can be here once you work out a certain number of them lots of things it's it's it's sort of like inspired guesswork sometimes you know that he respected he something very much what did he respect very much well maybe we should go and follow them everybody's uncle IRA who's Emperor but it brings will you work out a panties father and so it's by this order just work I suppose that people but the whole point of this is to see that there are two quite distinct scripts so if you look at the one person I said you know they a large script it looks like Chinese this also looks sort of like Chinese but even this Chinese and the other one does this one that's a really know Chinese and this one supposed to be the other story by the way about the or the other problem possibility that according to this story about the guy learning we're in in 20 days is all very well except that no known script of the week or so anybody else notes anything like that and then the week is your scripts and the widow's was very literate people and they knew Chinese now you I reckon they knew all sorts of you know varieties of Turkey and so on but no there are no none of the scripts of the wittiest new look anything like that so the question is where did this script come along well at the moment the answer is nobody knows maybe somebody just made it up but it's one of the big one of the big questions we're waiting for moving on a little bit because we're partly birthday time but more because you know that's rather sort of obscure sort of stuff this is quite interesting because again nobody knows what it is people guess what's got something to do with some sort of funerary you know place where the impressed coffin may have been laid until he was formerly a you know buried in a tomb or what-have-you but it's completely open anybody can go there and take their picture there and stand on top of a talk or whatever they want ah this is about the large estates that's either loud script you say civil smaller neighboring states have instituted an extreme point many Chinese who taught them how to write by altering characters in the clerical script heading there and cutting their heading here and cutting their they created a script with several thousand characters replacing the contacts made on lots of the wood so they created a script for civil thousand characters they not script along comes this prints and creates a scripture of about four hundred characters but what are the kiddos who they say oh that's very nice for guests two years or one with several thousand characters in which is a bit hard to sort of fare them just what's going on okay this was quite a big discovery quite recently these three four years ago of the large Kersey script if you think that these scripts are bad and up at least they look as if they are eligible it's just even look at ours as a juror and the reason is because this is a cursive right if the large the last script and this was discovered by a young Russian who was an expert on the CGI language and people knew that was a bull that's about two hundred and something pages long there was a book in some language which nobody knew what it was that I just put her in some pile of rubbish and then he was going through this pile of his stuff and he sort of looked at it and he realized that the date alert was a Kiton date that is and he couldn't discover that you know five years earlier because we didn't know what they think look like but now we know what they take so clock is there and he said or whatever he said you know this is a you know this is written in a lot quicker in the it had lots worked on the other hand but Russians many Russians every word scores being scholars they haven't published it yet the only published the first page because of course I want to translated themselves before they publish it at this rate is going to take you know two hundred years or something so like the Dead Sea Scrolls I think that probably took provider long time to tear to work out I lost that's not just my translator let's go and this is also another even though you might think this is a pretty Rick and I sort of feel that nobody who was already interested actually there's quite a lot of bubbling going on look at this assimilate you know all discoveries but this was very interesting this professor called block of love he was in Arabist here's a special to him medieval Arabic what you want to think of well you know there's nothing to do with you down there has nothing wrong kita but he was doing a very detailed modern addition of a geographer all in our mouth who's not only a java foodie he's sort of heard about everything one of the things he was interested in is how different people you know at the time you know didn't have 12 hours all day or do they have pretty well today what do they have 10 days a week oh you know all this sort of thing and when he's traveling around he's designed in this particular place they use the twelve animals designate are on this pity and this is how they pronounce ur and this particular one I say use the twelve animals to designate ominously how they pronounce and then he came across something which he couldn't quite work out because about half of them were Mongol and the other half where he had no idea but then he had a sword or an inspiration so he wrote to me and he said what do you think they are and I said my god well whatever Straley is for vodyanoy you know what's the survey of abortion why doesn't the only ones like I think I'm not very decent you know what he had discovered by accident were the Keaton words of the 12 animals which is not what anybody was expecting but what is exciting about this is that what people had reconstructed from within the language itself the twelve animals I already had eleven okay so now we know all twelve animals but layer again to quote a free initiative you know you think you've understood something and then you realize you have it that there's one word for Mori which everybody thought if anything is correct is you know accurate in this sort of stuff it's just murderous Mongolia with a horse and at him something has something so at harm over horse but then some people thought there's something wrong here because there's also a Turkish category Reagan which is I asked I've not taya and then people her to and fro awareness but what this fellow found out is that the Mongolian that the Keeton word for horses thought Maudie but it's three and some people reconstructed uh from within the language so even though it looked like Mongolia and some people thought uh yeah maybe maybe not this guy was able to show through the writings of some 11th century Jaffa who wrote down what he heard and the other thing that's got me terribly excited was who and how that us because Helena says the word for tiger in this email of animals and it looks like nothing because the Mongolian word is box and they make sure word or the virtual work is suspect huh but highlight of course is the same icon which is cancer and us matter means something that maybe it doesn't it's a taboo word which means something like king of the animals and why did I have a taboo word maybe because the tooth tiger will say to do almost certain Tetons or maybe all kittens what have you so that's why we have this a strange word not only attested in kiss from afar northeaster China but also from what us now as I start all this so you know it's just again if you like to take the adult you know something which appears to have no relevance whatsoever but it's just in the background there you know it's it's just not okay okay this is just a little illustration of a boy about what out how obviously seven eight her suppose and this little story for much from our Chinese ambassador when Chinese children throw in sewing kid until the first learn to read a first invert the order of the words in accordance with the language when I was serving as ambassador at the Jin said my companion was one cool every time he gave me an example katella made me laugh example when they read you know y'all saw some Chiayi shaman a bird rests on a tree in the middle of a pond the monk beats the door under the moon they say moon bright in monk door hits water what I mean through yonder on Cronos it's something like that so he thought this is weird you know but of course anybody knows about they sing said ah I'll take you know that this can be translated word-for-word into Mongolia so it was quite clear about what sort of gravely language here but the Chinese water didn't tweak to this because they didn't they thought they just translated literally so birds sit on bridge or what have you well then anyway that's a little picture of a tomb which was a little boy learning article he'll only get hurt whatever happened to the key to answer a lot of popular books about this because there's we swore from Efes our second smile it was a very very large area in a very powerful country and it disappeared just aren't any ketones anymore what happened to them and nobody really knows what's going on the place one of which is the dad was and the dog was a special lot of people who speak at the mongolian language with this surrounded with tongue go stop languages in other words how to be a parent sorta Mongolian language but amongst their creation mister amongst their national myths or what have you there are two versions to do with the Keaton's one is that they're descended from the Keaton's the other words that they're always been Douglas but after the Civil Wars and so on with the refugees theme after the Jeannie invasion and so on and so on very large numbers of Keaton's took refuge in that area which is up near Siberia so much in the middle of nowhere but nobody really knows this is just you know sort of what you know people talk about so nobody could prove it then actually rate of amazement 15 20 years ago news cut out there's a group of people in you know which about as far away from the Duggars as you could get on a Soviet China claimed that they were descended from the Keaton's and in fact there were 15 generation of a particular guitar general called Oh Cyril who had come to that area with the Mongol armies or James's car so it's will know that in you know those are civil groups of Mongols real moguls who do their Mongolian thing with you know whistling and archery and so on and so on so various experts went off to this place and they weren't particularly interested in their claims but they want to know what their language was like and the language was nothing like a true P okay because it should be a sort of Altaic language it was more like a a Southeast Asian like Thailand disorder that's our language so that the thing just stated a question just say there until 10 years ago when two was discovered they excavated and there was the body of a woman there which was a wooden usually she died buried they they cremated their bodies and you know put them in in pots or what have you and maybe people made you these'd our shaman must be some sort of a shaman and probably another shower but the Keaton's had a particular role in society of somebody called the raid woman and what exactly the raid woman did was sort of exactly a shaman who would jump up and down and talk to the spirits but sort of give advice when necessary and she would sit in a corner on every now and then she you know what I think that doesn't matter what does matter is that she was a genuine Keegan and that there was enough DNA in her body to be able to identify as a kita so the cat loves very shortly then compared the DNA with the unit and the DNA with the doll or not and they found indeed it was a much higher proportion of DNA and one would expect in those groups so it doesn't really prove anything but it gives a very good indication of that there's something in it s-sorry and it's just a very quick manner very recently a week or so ago I got an invitation to attend a conference on Keaton studies in Yunnan psyche done studies in you know what's all this about and it turns out to be sponsored by the you know whatever it is tourism bureau so they want to there was a you know come and have a look at a genuine Keith Allison anyway deputy you want to go to China in January but it's still something bubbling away there lady it was what I just said there he does not script we talked about that already this is the area where the Imperial tombs are and so for those of you into homes where as small as ever days it's a natural sort of barrier and in the old days of course so as a thank God you know he really thought about sort of gate there but it was because the whole thing fell apart at the end of the Qing Dynasty that the peasants and anybody else could go in there anyway there's a very beautiful very beautiful area that is what room looks like or I should say the interest or term looks like as you can see it's dug into the side of the mountain side and do you know how people find these things by the way he's your imagination grave robbers they're very good there we go to this other thing and the many lunches I've had in their part of the world one was quite how many were quite amazing but one had to do with a I think it was a hit of police in Haiti archaeological Pio a couple of grave robbers and so anyway there will there will the best of mates because you know anyway you can imagine it evil you know I know what I'm pushing my button I hear that's another one and I should have seen you dig into they the the balance on innocent all this is a rather upmarket sort of death of ask the aristocracy so this strange they would cremate their dead but then they would have wouldn't American side have wooden statues and then they put the ashes of the person inside the what etcetera said then they'd put the clothing of the person they had put a death mask on his face it's not amazing so they were able to produce reproduce the general appearance of what the person looked like whoever he was really he was really you know cremated and inside a little you know a that's a very elegant I bought a copy of left of it I don't know how did you end or something I'm very happy with it that's my original memento mori yeah okay this is just an interesting little map yo is sort of all over the place but these areas which you see a dots are where people have found terms and you can see this is Nanjing which said Beijing which is just beneath a the Great War anyway instead of support a lot of archaeological activity going on there if you look at that carefully you won't make any sense of it because this again is in the large script has been copied by somebody and again it looks pretty much as if a retired except that doesn't make any sense since a lot of characters look like Chinese but God so it's still one of those so one of those mysteries all the script this one because since where this talk was going to be much calmer what go on stage and then various when senator lanza but that is a that is an example of the Jurchen script and our matron from time to time and as you can see it's sort of rather similar to the Keaton our script but not really you know this may be yeah which is also anyway that some of the characters are the same as other scripts most of the characters are which is a Christian equated this come from waited and eat her lives who have become weird always what's comfortable again getting back to my friend yoga the fellow who said you know there's a possibility that this might be translatable he came up with another idea that this is a sort of a colloquial non official way of writing Chinese under the non Chinese you know sort of a historian sort of thing sublight neutral many were you know women's writing and so on and so on but that's purely a guess on his part still nobody knows where where all they deserve look like this is on the outer suburbs I suppose over the capital city the capital city who is called Xiang Jing the supreme capital and now it's called Swami barchi and every now and then you see the something which happens to be two survived that's another one I suspect he may have been knocked down he's being put up again this one if you look over on somebody's worked it out as a rather confused and not very police amateur archaeologists they're sort of doing this and the reasons are not very happy is you can see what the game the earth is like it's sort of pretty muddy and so the mother had sort of got into my shoes it was all squishing away and but if you were to be an archaeologist that's what you have to do apparently and you know I was I can't remember if that would butter and there's been a couple other people standing on what has left of the city wall of the jean-jean and it's not really very big in fact it's are the size of a football ground or something probably smaller so was that a big capital city by anyways okay ten cents for anybody who guess what that is obviously you know I'll show you what it used to look like until about 1920 something what do you think that is it's a set your my name but what happened during the Russian Civil Wars a lot of white Russian soldiers were taking refuge in that area and they were bored out of their bites and probably quite drunk and so they guess they used the head of kwaini Anna's rifle practice so they spent the last shooting up ahead and so the you got this father obscure looking bit of stone and have told me that somebody ever knew keep a a picture you know dating for 1920 something which which just another picture what the kid hunts okay I rather like this guy to another made looking guy that you will know what to take always this is what the inside of the tomb looks like all the terms remember we said this is a tall are you open the door and you go inside and LA I've got a better picture but this is the tombstone within it's real honor and this is you know just some decoration and what have you I well like her just because I like how she sort of you know terribly conscientious and terribly busy and he says some thought about it I was she a servant girl with her now if this system most wonderful thing you've ever seen it looks like you know somebody had a jolly good party and even clean up so it sort of closed the door and what are you but that's when I opened a door that's what they held and it really does look as if it was you know last night's party and if we look underneath the table we can see again the the tombstone and the to CERN has around that they 12 zodiac all animals and you can't see very clearly on this one but basically the tombstones there's something like this one reports a bit less than a meter maybe point 808 over later and you have added say this is so and so and you know he was the son of such ancestors actually married so and so and I had six children I know they did this and all they can we understood because it's all pretty pretty stereotype does the first you know but then we get to the real kid on bit of what exactly he did and then nobody can understand it which almost lead to the conclusion of this store but it's violent actually say over here this party I know what are they all those do you think or something like that this is a little humorously these are water balance which are the deceased to win him to the crier and this I rather like because we're used to talking about Mongolian hotpot it is a picture Akita hotpot so I'm running a sort of a and they know campaign at the moment havoc renamed become a katana put and you also notice by the way they're crazy he cuts and then they all look like that they won't got he cut at the top and sort of dangling down the front on the side I put here the last Keaton I don't what the exercise I did okay I just mentioned about these people in you'd on this ship might be dead by now because this picture is about twenty years old but this is the patriarch of the yunnan Ketones who claims to be a direct descendant of a particular key turn general and that's why they're now holding something sponsored by the tourism bureau of you know know or whatever it is okay we'll leave it at that stage of a quarter of an hour with you we could have cure they're never gonna get too many which is bad [Applause]

Channel: ANU TV

Views: 2,287

Keywords: ANU, The ANU, Education, Australia, Research, Policy, Academic, University, The Australian National University

Id: DsQZ981HNpM

Length: 75min 22sec (4522 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2017