Tangut Character 𗻈

It names a weed that grows among wheat and barley.

A Tangut dictionary glosses 𗻈 as “barnyard grass.” It appears second in the recorded word 𗺘𗻈. Its left side comes from the grass character 𗺕; the right uses the sound-bearing part of 𘀑, a Tangut character for a kind of bird.

When did Tangut writing begin?

The script was created around 1036 under Western Xia’s first emperor.

It was made to write the Tangut language, spoken in what is now northwestern China. After Western Xia fell to the Mongols, Tangut persisted in official, private, and religious texts under the Yuan and Ming dynasties before becoming obsolete by the Ming’s end. Scholars rediscovered the script in the late 19th century and largely deciphered it in the early 20th century.