14 ms·

Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by women (2017)

117 points by diodorus 7y ago

kupiakos 7y ago
This reminds me of The Stormlight Archive, in which reading, writing, and engineering are considered exclusively feminine.
teej 7y ago
Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy series The Stormlight Archive features a society where writing is considered a feminine art. Most men do not have the ability to read or write. Sanderson explores the consequences of this in that women are used exclusively for long distance communication and books. The women often write notes in the margins that are meant just for other women to understand the context of the text, but aren’t spoken aloud to men.
benrbray 7y ago
The hiragana writing system for Japanese has a similar history of use by only women, except that it became an integral part of the language! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  Hiragana was never "only for women". Being phonetic and syllabic, it was much easier to learn than Chinese characters (kanji) or man'yogana (kanji used phonetically), and because women at the time had less education, they usually defaulted to it.
  - jhanschoo 7y ago
    The article places Nvshu in a very similar social role to Hiragana in its early days. I'm referring more specifically to texts completely written in Nvshu and texts completely written in Hiragana. It's likely that in the milleu of Japan at that time, as when Nvshu flourished, the prevailing thought was that only Classical Chinese deserved to be written, and the local tongue did not deserve to be put to script. The Wikipedia article on Nvshu cites Chiang (1995) that this is the only known script for Xiangnan Tuhua. It's thus "only for women" in the same sense that Nvshu is only for women; many men had access to it, but none wrote literature completely in it.
RANDOMIZE_TIMER 7y ago
What about transgender women?
knolax 7y ago
For more concrete information about Nvshu see the Unicode proposal [0]. It seems that it's similar to Hirigana, an italicized version of Standard Chinese used as a syllabry. It's amazing how little information the linked article gives in comparison. [0] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09155-n3598-nushu.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09155-n3598-nushu.pdf
- powerapple 7y ago
  In Chinese teaching system, part of a character is used to represent a phoneme, basically you take part of a common character, to represent the part of pronunciation, and use it to spell out the pronunciation of a new character. Which is very similar to a phonetic language, and it shares more similarity with Hirigana, which is also phonetic.
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    You mean the radicals. As far as I know you can't construct the pronunciation of a chinese word from the character that represents it, not even the radical will help you. You literally have to memorize it. Every chinese kid does it. The radical exists for the chinese dictionary as an over complicated lookup mechanism.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      Radicals are the other half of phono-semantic compounds. For example, in 媽媽 māma "mother", 女 nǚ "woman" (the first half of 女書 nǚshū "woman's writing") is the radical and 馬 mǎ "horse" is the phonetic part. The radical helps narrow down the meaning and the phonetic component gives you an approximation of the pronunciation. Of course it depends on the time and place the character was coined and even then it wasn't always an exact match (see the phonetic series at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese), but if you have multiple reasonable guesses for the word, it can pretty much narrow them down to one. Similarly, the radical alone can't communicate the full meaning, but it helps with disambiguation. That's why dictionaries used it as a coarse categorization method.
lalos 7y ago
Not mentioned in the article, Nüshu translated literally means 'woman/female book' in Chinese.
- chewxy 7y ago
  I put it to you that 书 should be read as "a sense pertaining to writing". Thus when used as a noun, it means "book", but also may mean anything closely related to writing. 法 means "a sense pertaining to order, method and law". Thus 书法 means "writing | order/method/law"... or calligraphy
drcode 7y ago
This article doesn't address obvious questions, such as "How hard was the text to decipher?" or "How similar is it to known Chinese scripts?"
- dwohnitmok 7y ago
  How hard was the text to decipher? Not very. Scholars managed to track down a scant few last surviving readers of the script and were able to decipher texts with their help. How similar is it to known Chinese scripts? Most Nushu characters are modified from standard Chinese script, sometimes just by tilting a Chinese character. However, Nushu, unlike Chinese characters, is generally speaking a syllabary. Each of these Chinese characters was chosen for its sound (in the local dialect) and then reused in all places that sound was used, regardless of the original meaning of the Chinese character. There are some "homegrown" logograms as well. However, it is completely unreadable to a Chinese speaker. Certainly I can't read it at all. All that sticks out is the occasional slanted standard Chinese character, which because it's a syllabary, I have no idea whether it corresponds to the meaning of the Chinese character in ordinary Chinese.
  - inimino 7y ago
    > How hard was the text to decipher? Not very. Scholars managed to track down a scant few last surviving readers of the script and were able to decipher texts with their help. Without their help they would have had to decipher it. With their help they did not need to decipher it because it was read to them. If you can read it, it isn't deciphering. (Just a point of terminology here for all the cryptographers reading this ;-)).
    - braythwayt 7y ago
      Well, he says, rubbing his chin... If the speakers read the texts to you, you aren’t deciphering them, but what if you have 100 texts, and they read ten to you, then you work out that it is phonetic and compile what you think is an alphabet you use to read the rest? Only from time to time you stumble, so you ask them to read passages that don’t fit your hypothetical alphabet. And you use that to refine your understanding? Some of that activity would be deciphering, wouldn’t it? Could we consider the surviving readers to have the task of suppling you with cleartext to go with the ciphertext? (Not trying to start a formal argument, just feeling around for the edge of the definition of “deciphering” by way of a hypothetical.)
dwohnitmok 7y ago
Nushu has a rather interesting (and recent!) history of discovery by the wider world. No one is really quite sure when Nushu was created. We have records that during the first half of the 20th century, several people from the outside world stumbled across the existence of Nushu. However, the study of it really began in earnest with a scholar named Zhou Shuoyi, who toiled away with one of the few remaining readers, Hu Chishu, of it from the 50s through the Cultural Revolution. Hu gave him a set of Nushu documents. Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away. A then-recently-minted philosophy PhD student, Gong Zhebing, who happened to be canvassing the area heard of the script from some locals, who had only known of it as a script that occasionally replaced a few Chinese characters, or was used for decorative purposes. Gong managed to find Zhou and together the two of them tracked down a surviving woman who knew the characters, an 81-year-old by the name of Gao Yinxian. She had a cache of Nushu documents that Gong and Zhou were able to translate into Chinese characters. Gong and Zhou also recorded samples of her singing some of these documents. Gong then published in 1983 his groundbreaking "A Report On the Study of a Type of Special Script," (关于一种特殊文字的调查报告) which led to the widespread recognition of Nushu and is the main source of the events I've related above. At the time of publication, Gong knew of only two (!) surviving women who could read Nushu, Gao being one of them. This was a script that was potentially on the knife's edge of survival, having already been threatened once by the Cultural Revolution. If you can read Chinese I'd recommend a look at Gong's original article here: https://www.ixueshu.com/document/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7f9386.html https://www.ixueshu.com/document/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7... as well as well as a summary article detailing the discovery process of Nushu (女书:谁是第一个发现者和第一个研究者 as published in 学术研究 by 蒋书红 and 孙雍长) https://wenku.baidu.com/view/943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html https://wenku.baidu.com/view/943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html Otherwise, if there's sufficient interest in this thread, I can try taking a crack at translating them. No promises though. They're pretty lengthy articles.
- k_sze 7y ago
  > Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away. Every time I read this kind of stuff, it makes me feel really mad and sad at the same time. Some people would blame Mao, some would blame the Gang of Four, some would blame the CCP as a whole. I personally don't know who to blame. Yes they were all pretty awful, but it also took a whole bunch (we're talking about millions) of other gullible people to enact that madness. As a Chinese, I feel really sad that we lost so much of our heritage and intellectual progress for essentially a power grab of four people. Nüshu is just a tiny example. The fact that we had such a big number of gullible and arrogant people who were willing to turn on their compatriots in some of the most inhumane ways possible, it makes me really sad.
dwohnitmok 7y ago
Another fun alternative Chinese script is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing. It's generally fun to see the usually strict relationship between Chinese graphs and the Chinese language taken apart and examined in isolation. Whether that's taking Chinese or Chinese-like graphs and re-using them for other languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawndip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawndip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana) or other writing systems for Chinese such as Nushu or Xiaoerjing. It's also interesting to see this relationship break down in studies of very ancient Chinese and Chinese etymology where you often have to consider the development of Chinese graphs and Chinese words/morphemes in isolation.
chromeaway 7y ago
Reminded me of Eme-sal, a notable variety or sociolect of Sumerian: >eme-sal (𒅴𒊩 EME.SAL), possibly to be interpreted as "fine tongue" or "high-pitched voice" ... used exclusively by female characters in some literary texts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Dialects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Dialects
_Nat_ 7y ago
Apparently it was like [Pig Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Latin), where it wasn't really so much "secret" as much as it was a linguistic buffer: > When Nüshu was first discovered by people outside of Jiangyong in the 1980s, the media sensationalized the script as an invented, secret language that women could use to spite men and a patriarchal society. This is what initially drew Silber to study Nüshu. But what she found was that men were well aware that women had been writing in the script. It wasn’t an entirely new, made-up language but actually a writing system for the local dialect, and if men heard Nüshu read aloud they most likely would have been able to understand. Men mostly just didn’t care to learn how to write in women’s script. More generally, these seem to be examples of ["secret" languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot) or [language games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game). This seems to happen in modern-day American schools, too, where certain groups -- e.g., gender-specific, but also other types -- would select a foreign language that other students don't normally pick. Or, in the case of anime/manga fans, they might pick up Japanese during their free time. It's not that the foreign language was secret, but others' unfamiliarity with the language would still give the in-group a linguistic buffer. I guess video-gamer jargon, 1337, and even sports metaphors can be seen as examples of this.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  One term for such is a Cant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_%28language%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_%28language%29
paggle 7y ago
“Out of the thousands of scripts that are gender-specific to men, here we have one that we know is gender-specific to women,” says Silber Anyone have more detail about these thousands of gender specific male scripts? Never heard of this.
- twic 7y ago
  I don't know of any gender-specific scripts, but i've read about secret languages that are taught as part of a boy's initiation into adulthood in, i think some Pacific island cultures. I can't find a reference to any of them, though - just too secret, i suppose. I did find this, a secret language spoken by traditional healers in the Andes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallawaya_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallawaya_language
- snorkasaurus 7y ago
  I took it as a snarky swipe at "the patriarchy".
growlist 7y ago
Is there anything more tedious than liberal divide-and-conquer tactics masquerading as x group rights? I'm amazed that anyone with half a brain can't see this stuff for what it is.

117 points by diodorus 7y ago

This reminds me of The Stormlight Archive, in which reading, writing, and engineering are considered exclusively feminine.

teej 7y ago

Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy series The Stormlight Archive features a society where writing is considered a feminine art. Most men do not have the ability to read or write. Sanderson explores the consequences of this in that women are used exclusively for long distance communication and books. The women often write notes in the margins that are meant just for other women to understand the context of the text, but aren’t spoken aloud to men.

benrbray 7y ago

The hiragana writing system for Japanese has a similar history of use by only women, except that it became an integral part of the language! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
Hiragana was never "only for women". Being phonetic and syllabic, it was much easier to learn than Chinese characters (kanji) or man'yogana (kanji used phonetically), and because women at the time had less education, they usually defaulted to it.
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  The article places Nvshu in a very similar social role to Hiragana in its early days. I'm referring more specifically to texts completely written in Nvshu and texts completely written in Hiragana. It's likely that in the milleu of Japan at that time, as when Nvshu flourished, the prevailing thought was that only Classical Chinese deserved to be written, and the local tongue did not deserve to be put to script. The Wikipedia article on Nvshu cites Chiang (1995) that this is the only known script for Xiangnan Tuhua. It's thus "only for women" in the same sense that Nvshu is only for women; many men had access to it, but none wrote literature completely in it.

RANDOMIZE_TIMER 7y ago

What about transgender women?

knolax 7y ago

For more concrete information about Nvshu see the Unicode proposal [0]. It seems that it's similar to Hirigana, an italicized version of Standard Chinese used as a syllabry. It's amazing how little information the linked article gives in comparison. [0] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09155-n3598-nushu.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09155-n3598-nushu.pdf

powerapple 7y ago
In Chinese teaching system, part of a character is used to represent a phoneme, basically you take part of a common character, to represent the part of pronunciation, and use it to spell out the pronunciation of a new character. Which is very similar to a phonetic language, and it shares more similarity with Hirigana, which is also phonetic.
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  You mean the radicals. As far as I know you can't construct the pronunciation of a chinese word from the character that represents it, not even the radical will help you. You literally have to memorize it. Every chinese kid does it. The radical exists for the chinese dictionary as an over complicated lookup mechanism.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    Radicals are the other half of phono-semantic compounds. For example, in 媽媽 māma "mother", 女 nǚ "woman" (the first half of 女書 nǚshū "woman's writing") is the radical and 馬 mǎ "horse" is the phonetic part. The radical helps narrow down the meaning and the phonetic component gives you an approximation of the pronunciation. Of course it depends on the time and place the character was coined and even then it wasn't always an exact match (see the phonetic series at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese), but if you have multiple reasonable guesses for the word, it can pretty much narrow them down to one. Similarly, the radical alone can't communicate the full meaning, but it helps with disambiguation. That's why dictionaries used it as a coarse categorization method.

lalos 7y ago

Not mentioned in the article, Nüshu translated literally means 'woman/female book' in Chinese.

chewxy 7y ago
I put it to you that 书 should be read as "a sense pertaining to writing". Thus when used as a noun, it means "book", but also may mean anything closely related to writing. 法 means "a sense pertaining to order, method and law". Thus 书法 means "writing | order/method/law"... or calligraphy

drcode 7y ago

This article doesn't address obvious questions, such as "How hard was the text to decipher?" or "How similar is it to known Chinese scripts?"

dwohnitmok 7y ago
How hard was the text to decipher? Not very. Scholars managed to track down a scant few last surviving readers of the script and were able to decipher texts with their help. How similar is it to known Chinese scripts? Most Nushu characters are modified from standard Chinese script, sometimes just by tilting a Chinese character. However, Nushu, unlike Chinese characters, is generally speaking a syllabary. Each of these Chinese characters was chosen for its sound (in the local dialect) and then reused in all places that sound was used, regardless of the original meaning of the Chinese character. There are some "homegrown" logograms as well. However, it is completely unreadable to a Chinese speaker. Certainly I can't read it at all. All that sticks out is the occasional slanted standard Chinese character, which because it's a syllabary, I have no idea whether it corresponds to the meaning of the Chinese character in ordinary Chinese.
- inimino 7y ago
  > How hard was the text to decipher? Not very. Scholars managed to track down a scant few last surviving readers of the script and were able to decipher texts with their help. Without their help they would have had to decipher it. With their help they did not need to decipher it because it was read to them. If you can read it, it isn't deciphering. (Just a point of terminology here for all the cryptographers reading this ;-)).
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Well, he says, rubbing his chin... If the speakers read the texts to you, you aren’t deciphering them, but what if you have 100 texts, and they read ten to you, then you work out that it is phonetic and compile what you think is an alphabet you use to read the rest? Only from time to time you stumble, so you ask them to read passages that don’t fit your hypothetical alphabet. And you use that to refine your understanding? Some of that activity would be deciphering, wouldn’t it? Could we consider the surviving readers to have the task of suppling you with cleartext to go with the ciphertext? (Not trying to start a formal argument, just feeling around for the edge of the definition of “deciphering” by way of a hypothetical.)

dwohnitmok 7y ago

Nushu has a rather interesting (and recent!) history of discovery by the wider world. No one is really quite sure when Nushu was created. We have records that during the first half of the 20th century, several people from the outside world stumbled across the existence of Nushu. However, the study of it really began in earnest with a scholar named Zhou Shuoyi, who toiled away with one of the few remaining readers, Hu Chishu, of it from the 50s through the Cultural Revolution. Hu gave him a set of Nushu documents. Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away. A then-recently-minted philosophy PhD student, Gong Zhebing, who happened to be canvassing the area heard of the script from some locals, who had only known of it as a script that occasionally replaced a few Chinese characters, or was used for decorative purposes. Gong managed to find Zhou and together the two of them tracked down a surviving woman who knew the characters, an 81-year-old by the name of Gao Yinxian. She had a cache of Nushu documents that Gong and Zhou were able to translate into Chinese characters. Gong and Zhou also recorded samples of her singing some of these documents. Gong then published in 1983 his groundbreaking "A Report On the Study of a Type of Special Script," (关于一种特殊文字的调查报告) which led to the widespread recognition of Nushu and is the main source of the events I've related above. At the time of publication, Gong knew of only two (!) surviving women who could read Nushu, Gao being one of them. This was a script that was potentially on the knife's edge of survival, having already been threatened once by the Cultural Revolution. If you can read Chinese I'd recommend a look at Gong's original article here: https://www.ixueshu.com/document/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7f9386.html https://www.ixueshu.com/document/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7... as well as well as a summary article detailing the discovery process of Nushu (女书:谁是第一个发现者和第一个研究者 as published in 学术研究 by 蒋书红 and 孙雍长) https://wenku.baidu.com/view/943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html https://wenku.baidu.com/view/943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html Otherwise, if there's sufficient interest in this thread, I can try taking a crack at translating them. No promises though. They're pretty lengthy articles.

k_sze 7y ago
> Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away. Every time I read this kind of stuff, it makes me feel really mad and sad at the same time. Some people would blame Mao, some would blame the Gang of Four, some would blame the CCP as a whole. I personally don't know who to blame. Yes they were all pretty awful, but it also took a whole bunch (we're talking about millions) of other gullible people to enact that madness. As a Chinese, I feel really sad that we lost so much of our heritage and intellectual progress for essentially a power grab of four people. Nüshu is just a tiny example. The fact that we had such a big number of gullible and arrogant people who were willing to turn on their compatriots in some of the most inhumane ways possible, it makes me really sad.

dwohnitmok 7y ago

Another fun alternative Chinese script is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing. It's generally fun to see the usually strict relationship between Chinese graphs and the Chinese language taken apart and examined in isolation. Whether that's taking Chinese or Chinese-like graphs and re-using them for other languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawndip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawndip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana) or other writing systems for Chinese such as Nushu or Xiaoerjing. It's also interesting to see this relationship break down in studies of very ancient Chinese and Chinese etymology where you often have to consider the development of Chinese graphs and Chinese words/morphemes in isolation.

chromeaway 7y ago

Reminded me of Eme-sal, a notable variety or sociolect of Sumerian: >eme-sal (𒅴𒊩 EME.SAL), possibly to be interpreted as "fine tongue" or "high-pitched voice" ... used exclusively by female characters in some literary texts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Dialects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Dialects

_Nat_ 7y ago

Apparently it was like [Pig Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Latin), where it wasn't really so much "secret" as much as it was a linguistic buffer: > When Nüshu was first discovered by people outside of Jiangyong in the 1980s, the media sensationalized the script as an invented, secret language that women could use to spite men and a patriarchal society. This is what initially drew Silber to study Nüshu. But what she found was that men were well aware that women had been writing in the script. It wasn’t an entirely new, made-up language but actually a writing system for the local dialect, and if men heard Nüshu read aloud they most likely would have been able to understand. Men mostly just didn’t care to learn how to write in women’s script. More generally, these seem to be examples of ["secret" languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot) or [language games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game). This seems to happen in modern-day American schools, too, where certain groups -- e.g., gender-specific, but also other types -- would select a foreign language that other students don't normally pick. Or, in the case of anime/manga fans, they might pick up Japanese during their free time. It's not that the foreign language was secret, but others' unfamiliarity with the language would still give the in-group a linguistic buffer. I guess video-gamer jargon, 1337, and even sports metaphors can be seen as examples of this.

tempguy9999 7y ago
One term for such is a Cant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_%28language%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_%28language%29

paggle 7y ago

“Out of the thousands of scripts that are gender-specific to men, here we have one that we know is gender-specific to women,” says Silber Anyone have more detail about these thousands of gender specific male scripts? Never heard of this.

twic 7y ago
I don't know of any gender-specific scripts, but i've read about secret languages that are taught as part of a boy's initiation into adulthood in, i think some Pacific island cultures. I can't find a reference to any of them, though - just too secret, i suppose. I did find this, a secret language spoken by traditional healers in the Andes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallawaya_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallawaya_language
snorkasaurus 7y ago
I took it as a snarky swipe at "the patriarchy".

growlist 7y ago

Is there anything more tedious than liberal divide-and-conquer tactics masquerading as x group rights? I'm amazed that anyone with half a brain can't see this stuff for what it is.