Tangut Poetry part one

I haven't posted in ages, but I have been working on the translations of this Tangut document. But without too much succes, mostly because my current dictionary just has too many gaps. I'll post my progress anyway and if you feel that can be of any help, feel free to contact me.This is the introductory part of the poem. The sentences are long, and devoid of normal grammatical indications; no noun cases, and only one verbal conjugation.

What I found the most striking was the repetition of a 4 character group in both sentences.

According to my dictionary these characters were supposed to mean these 4 kanji: 捕飾置文, which roughly translate to: 'to capture', 'to decorate', 'to place', 'writing'. In both chinese and Japanese the combination of 'to place' and 'writing' can mean 'to leave a note', but it's not likely these 4 characters have that meaning since in the first sentence they are followep by the character for 'to say'. So, I believe that it's actually the name of a person.

If we would litterarely translate the first line we would get:
to capture, to decorate, to place, culture, to say, Stupid, Ashamed, sacrifice, flattery, Theory, fault, to see, Don’t, to laugh.

Doesn't make much sense does it? We've already concluded that the first 4 characters are probably a name. so it's 'name says:'.

Now we come to another group of seemingly random words. But the word that says 'theory' is also the word that is used for buddhist dharma (law) and theories in tangut. I believe that these 4 characters are a translated buddhist term, maybe even a phonetic transcription of the sanskrit word. so now we have 'name says: buddhist dharma'.

fault,to see, don't, to laugh needs some further explanation. 'to laugh' was actually a direct translation of the character 哂. Which is actually just a phonetic sign 'ha' (as in hahaha). I think here the sound of laughing isn't actually meant, but a badly translated particle used in the tangut language. Which particle I do not know.


I derrived the meaning don't from the kanji 勿, which like in Chinese has the function to suggest, or prohibit someone to not do something. so maybe the phrase would translate to something like 'Don't see fault'. So all together we could suggest an approximate translation of this text as:
'name says: Do not seek/see fault in buddhist dharma! How this relates to the actual poem is a mystery to me. It could even mean that I'm completely wrong with my translation. The sentence might even be from a preceding paragraph in the document.

The second sentence is slightly more legible. The characters directly translated would say this:

New, to assemble, gold, Name(the four character name), perfective particle,to originate

Assuming that the Name is indeed a name. this sentence is a lot more logical. The firs three characters seem to be a place name. Xin Ju would be the chinese pronunciation of the first two characters and that is actually a place in China. Now I know for a fact that in the Tangut language a place name is never left without a suffix explaining what kind of place it is. The word 'gold' is probably a bad mistranslation for 'place/river/state' or something along those lines.
Keeping into account that Tangut doesn't mark the dative-locative case, this sentence is quite easily translated.

As I stated before, the before last character is a 'perfective particle'. This is a form of verb conjugation which is quite different from how it would work in most other languages. So I'll explain a bit about how this perfective particle works.
When a perfective particle is placed in front of a verb, this verb becomes perfect. For example:
perfective particle + kill = have killed.

There are 6 different perfective particles. Every verb takes one of these 6 particles. You can't see nor hear which particle belongs to which verb. One verb takes one particle, and another verb takes another particle. In earlier times these 6 particles apperently had something to do with the direction of the action, but this has already been lost.

If you want to read more on the subject of Tangut Verb Conjugation please visit this link:
The Verb in Tangut by Xenia Kepping

Now we know that perfective particle + originated means 'has originated/originated' we can figure out the meaning of the sentence:

'at(from) Xin Ju name originated.'

That's all for now. I have already looked at the poem, but I am not done translating it yet. Luckily, the sentences are a lot shorter and also easier, since they follow quite easy structure. More to come soon. I hope.