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OTHER IDEOGRAPHIC SCRIPTS This section terminates with the ideographic script which is probably the most recently invented. The Chukcha, or Tschuktchis, Chanktus ("Men"), or Tuski ("Brothers, confederates"), are a Luoravetlan, Palæoasiatic. Mongoloid people inhabiting the shores of the Arctic Ocean and Behring Sea in north-eastern Siberia
The Chukcha had no written language before about 1930. About that time, a Chukcha shepherd named Tenevil', who lived in the region of the upper Anadyr, invented a peculiar script. The Leningrad Arctic Institute possesses a collection of fourteen wooden tablets written by Tenevil', and brought there in 1933 by the Chukcha expedition of that Institute. The script is a quite primitive ideography; the characters, however, are stylized. Fig. 81, 1 shows a specimen of this script, and Fig. 81, 2 reproduces some symbols.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
V. G. Bogoraz, in E. A. Krejnovich, Languages and Literatures of the Palo)Asiatic Peoples (constituting Part 111 of Languages and Literatures of the Northern Peoples, edited as Vol. III of the Linguistic Section of the Russian Institute for the Study of the Peoples of the North"), in Russian, Leningrad, 1934.
K. Bouda, in "ZEITSCHR, DER DEUTSCH. MORGENL. GESELLSCH.," 1937.
J. Friedrich, Die Wortschrift des Tschiktschen Teneril (Zu einigen Schrifter findungen der neuesten Zeit), the same journal, 1938.