Sawndip
ideographic writing system of the Zhuang language
Sawndip (Sawndip: 𭨡𮄫; Zhuang pronunciation: [θaɯ˨˦ɗip˥]) are Chinese characters used to write the Zhuang languages in the Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan. Sawndip is a Zhuang word that means "immature characters". The Zhuang word for Chinese characters used in the Chinese languages is sawgun (𭨡倱 'Han characters'); gun is the Zhuang term for the Han Chinese. Even now, in traditional and less formal domains, Sawndip is more often used than alphabetical scripts.
Names
Sawndip is also called old Zhuang script, usually used to distinguish it from the Latin-based Standard Zhuang. In Standard Chinese, the old Zhuang script is called Gu Zhuangzi (古壮字; 古壯字; 'old Zhuang characters') or Fangkuai Zhuangzi (方块壮字; 方塊壯字; 'square shaped Zhuang characters').
Sawndip and its synonyms can be used with a spectrum of narrow to broad meanings. The narrowest meaning confines its use just to characters created by Zhuang to write Zhuang and excludes existing Chinese characters. At its broadest, it includes all the "square" characters used to write Zhuang regardless of whether they are of Chinese or Zhuang origin. However, it is not always possible to determine the origin of a character.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sawndip” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.