Downes Alan. Xixia dictionaries (supplement to the Xixia writing system)

Sydney: Macquarie University, 2008. — 1054 p. Bachelor of Arts honours thesis. Supervisor: professor Daniel Kane.The Xixia were an independent state established during the Song dynasty within the borders of present-day China. They developed a script that rivals Chinese in its complexity. The methods that have been historically used to describe characters are presented. A new method called the recursive radical method is then developed to exactly describe the structure of a Xixia character based on its components. This is then further developed into a transliteration method for the characters. Dictionaries are built up based on this transliteration method. A categorical dictionary for the Xixia characters is also presented. The grammar of the Xixia language is briefly outlined before finishing with an overview of the Xixia research literature.