Tangut component 017

Read it as part of a whole Tangut character.

The Tangut script, also called Xixia, was created for the Tangut language under Western Xia around 1036. By the 12th century, the state used it for official writing and to translate Buddhist and Chinese works. After Western Xia fell to the Mongols, the script continued in use under the Yuan and Ming dynasties, then became obsolete by the end of Ming. Scholars rediscovered it in the late 19th century.

The mid-12th-century Sea of Characters, a Tangut dictionary, analyzed characters through their parts. Modern component sets combine elements from several dictionaries because scholars have not used one standard system. “017” is a serial Unicode label, not a historical Tangut name, pronunciation, or translation.

Why can’t 𘠐 be translated alone?

Use the full character to work out a component’s role.

An Ideographic Description Sequence (IDS) records how parts are arranged in a Tangut character. In the Sea of Characters, an element could refer to another character linked by sound or meaning; the source character, not the element by itself, carried that link. The sequence describes structure: placing 𘠐 beside another text character does not fuse them.