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Software to the rescue of world's last hieroglyphics

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A doctoral student at Dalian Nationalities University has written a software program he hopes will encourage young people to study Naxi Dongba, a rare hieroglyphic language on the mainland and the last in use today.

The software was created by Liu Yangkui. His work is part of a larger project at the university in northeastern Liaoning province to write word-processing software for 16 minority languages on the mainland. An unrelated project can be found at www.naxidongba.com.

Researchers hope their work will enable ethnic minority groups to use their language in common software applications such as Word, Excel and other programs.

'I think one of the reasons not many Naxi young people are willing to study the Dongba language today is because it's very complex to write,' Mr Liu said.

'With this kind of program, that difficulty is erased. You just have to be able to recognise the character, and when reading you can often just guess the meaning.'

Among the 16 targeted languages, Dongba, the hieroglyphic language of China's Naxi minority who make their home in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, is considered the most endangered. Today there are about 250,000 Naxi. Only a handful of them, mostly elderly, can fluently read and write the ancient Dongba hieroglyphic script.

Naxi relic scripts are worn and brittle to the touch. Without the implementation of an efficient tool to word process, translate and preserve the scripts, researchers fear the world's last hieroglyphic language to remain in use could be lost forever.

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