Tangut characters can be divided into two classes: simple and composite. The latter are much more numerous. The simple characters can be either semantic or phonetic. None of the Tangut characters are pictographic, while the Chinese characters were at the time of their creation; this is one of the major differences between Tangut and Chinese characters. 's decipherment of 37 Tangut characters Most composite characters comprise two components. A few comprise three or four. A component can be a simple character, or part of a composite character. The composite characters include semantic-semantic ones and semantic-phonetic ones. A few special composite characters were made for
transliterating Chinese and
Sanskrit. There are a number of pairs of special composite characters worth noting. The members of such a pair have the same components, only the location of the components in them is different (e.g. AB vs. BA, ABC vs. ACB). The members of such a pair have very similar meanings.
The Sea of Characters (Tangut: ; ), a 12th-century monolingual Tangut rhyming dictionary, analyzes what other characters each character is derived from. Its analyses illustrate another difference between Tangut and Chinese characters. In Chinese, typically, each semantic component has its own meaning, and each phonetic component its own sound; they contribute this meaning or sound to any complex character they appear in. By contrast, in the
Sea of Characters analysis of Tangut, a component contributes the meaning or sound of some other character that contains it, potentially a different one in every appearance. For example, the component can have the meaning of "bird" ( *dźjwow, of which it is the left side), as in *dze "wild goose"
= *dźjwow "bird"
+ *dze "longevity". But the same component is also used to convey meanings of bone, smoke, food, and time, among others. Some components take different shape depending on what part of the character they appear in (e.g., left side, right side, middle, bottom). == Reconstruction ==