Zhuang logogram

Zhuang logograms or sawndip are logograms created as a derivative characters of Han characters and used by Zhuang in Guangxi, China. In , it is called
Gǔ Zhuàngzì or Fāngkuài Zhuàngzì , meaning ''old Zhuang'' or ''square shaped Zhuang''.

History

Sawndip is a Zhuang word that means immature character. Though it is not clarified when was the time of its creation, but the present oldest record of this logograms is a stela built in 689, Tang dynasty. These logograms were used earlier than Vietnamese Chu Nom.

They have been used for over 1300 years by Zhuang singers and shamans to record poems and scriptures. Though the romanized script for Zhuang language was created in 1957 as the official script, sawndip continues to be used to this day.

Published in 1989 the Sawndip Sawdenj includes characters written in manuscipts dated before the end of the Qing Dynasty .

Some logograms are used as a part of Han characters for Guangxi place names, such as ''bya'' for mountain or ''ndoeng'' for forest and are encoded as Unicode ideograms. However, many thousands of Zhuang logograms have yet to be encoded in Unicode.