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".
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