In Tangut Language and Manuscripts, Shi Jinbo offers by far the fullest introduction to the Tangut script, grammar and manuscripts, which lay the foundation of historical narratives of Western Xia.

"This is the first introduction to the economic history of the Tangut Empire (1038-1227). Built on a wealth of economic data and evidence, it studies the economic lives and activities, laws and institutions, trade and transactions in the "Great State White and High". It interprets primary sources written in the mysterious Tangut cursive script: taxes, registers, and contracts, alongside archives, chronicles, and law codes. By weaving Song, Liao, and Jin materials with Khara-Khoto, Wuwei, and Dunhuang manuscripts into a historical narrative, the book offers a gateway to the outer shape and inner life of the Western Xia (Xixia) economy and society, and rethinks the Tanguts' influence on the Hexi Corridor and the Silk Road"--

Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia--not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. Peter Kornicki takes the reader from the early centuries of the common era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly-valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated. This long process has some parallels with vernacularization in Europe, but a crucial difference is that literary Chinese was, unlike Latin, not a spoken language. As a consequence, people who spoke different East Asian vernaculars had no means of communicating in speech, but they could communicate silently by means of written conversation in literary Chinese; a further consequence is that within each society Chinese texts assumed vernacular garb: in classes and lectures, Chinese texts were read and declaimed in the vernaculars. What happened in the nineteenth century and why are there still so many different scripts in East Asia? How and why were Chinese texts dethroned, and what replaced them? These are some of the questions addressed in Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia.

This book examines Tangut translations of secular Chinese texts excavated from the ruins of Khara-khoto. After providing an overview of Tangut history and an introduction to the emergence of the field of Tangut studies, it presents four case studies

This is the first introduction to the economic history of the Tangut Empire (1038-1227). Built on a wealth of economic data and evidence, it studies the economic lives and activities, laws and institutions, trade and transactions in the “Great State White and High”. It interprets primary sources written in the mysterious Tangut cursive script: taxes, registers, and contracts, alongside archives, chronicles, and law codes. By weaving Song, Liao, and Jin materials with Khara-Khoto, Wuwei, and Dunhuang manuscripts into a historical narrative, the book offers a gateway to the outer shape and inner life of the Western Xia (Xixia) economy and society, and rethinks the Tanguts’ influence on the Hexi Corridor and the Silk Road.

The Kurux Language: Grammar, Texts and Lexicon by Masato Kobayashi and Bablu Tirkey is a comprehensive description of Kurux, a northern Dravidian tribal language with two million speakers. Isolated in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Eastern India, Kurux shows a unique mixture of archaic Dravidian traits and innovations induced by contact with neighboring Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, and has posed questions regarding language change and Dravidian subgrouping. Making use of first-hand materials from their fieldwork, Kobayashi and Tirkey analyze the complexities of the language in the grammar section. This book also contains transcribed and glossed texts, and a lexicon with more than 9,000 entries, and serves both as reference for linguists and learning resource for students.

“Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.