西夏文字
After the arrival of the Khara-Khoto material in Saint Petersburg in autumn 1909, sinologist Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov (1878–1937) worked on the preservation and identification of the hundreds of books and manuscripts that were written in the Tangut script, and it was not long before he discovered a bilingual Chinese-Tangut glossary called the "Pearl in the Palm" () which he immediately realised was the key to deciphering the Tangut language. He later discovered three monolingual Tangut dictionaries and glossaries among the Khara-Khoto material: "Homophones" (); "Sea of Characters" (); and "Mixed Characters" (). Ivanov published a number of articles on the Tangut script between 1909 and 1920, which helped disseminate knowledge of the Tangut script, and encouraged other scholars to study the language. In 1916, based on the material published by Ivanov, the German orientalist Berthold Laufer (1874–1934) published a study of the Tangut language in which he attempted to reconstruct the pronunciations of some characters, and in which he proposed that the Tangut language belonged to the Lolo-Moso branch of the Tibeto-Burman family.