Andrew C. West scripsit: > These are glyph variants of Phags-pa letters that are used with semantic > distinctiveness in a single (but very important) text, _Menggu Ziyun_ , a 14th > century rhyming dictionary of Chinese in which Chinese ideographs are listed by > their Phags-pa spellings. In this one text only, variant forms of the letters > FA, SHA, HA and YA are used contrastively in order to represent historical > phonetic differences between Chinese syllables that were pronounced the same in > early 14th century standard Chinese (Old Mandarin).
In short, these are like the diacritics used in some English-language dictionaries to mark up English words to show how the vowels are pronounced, except they are "abstract diacritics" rather than shape-based ones. -- "While staying with the Asonu, I met a man from John Cowan the Candensian plane, which is very much like [EMAIL PROTECTED] ours, only more of it consists of Toronto." http://:www.ccil.org/~cowan --the unnamed narrator of Le Guin's _Changing Planes_
