Posted on 02/29/2004 4:45:38 PM PST by blam
The secret language of Chinese women Tongue devised by 'sworn sisters' came down through centuries
Edward Cody, Washington Post
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Pumei Village, Hunan Province, C -- Nowadays, it would be called empowering women. But back then, centuries ago, it was just a way for the sworn sisters of this rugged and tradition-laden Chinese countryside to share their hopes, their joys and their many sorrows.
Only men learned to read and write Chinese, and bound feet and social strictures confined women to their husband's homes. So somehow -- scholars are unsure how, or exactly when -- the women of this fertile valley in the southwestern corner of Hunan province developed their own way to communicate. It was a delicate, graceful script handed down from grandmother to granddaughter, from elderly aunt to adolescent niece, from girlfriend to girlfriend -- and never, ever shared with the men and boys.
So was born nushu, or women's script, a single-sex writing system that Chinese scholars believe is the only one of its kind.
"The girls used to get together and sing and talk, and that's when we learned from one another," said Yang Huanyi, 98, a wrinkled farmer's widow whom scholars consider the most accomplished reader and writer among a fast- dwindling number of nushu practitioners. "It made our lives better, because we could express ourselves that way."
Renewed interest
Scholars and local authorities have taken renewed interest in the exclusive language, trying to preserve it as the last women who are fluent reach the end of their lives. Generations of women in the region once penned their diaries in nushu, and the few journals that survived offer a unique chronicle of these private lives long ago. Today, girls learn Chinese along with the boys, so learning nushu has less appeal.
Nushu in some ways resembles Chinese, if some of the characters were stretched and altered. But it also differs in many respects. For example, according to researchers, the letters represent sound -- the sounds of this region's Cheng Guan Tuhua dialect -- and not ideas, as in the Chinese ideograms that men studied and wrote. Nushu was written from top to bottom in wispy, elongated letters in columns that read from right to left.
Much remains unknown about nushu. Its origins, reaching perhaps as far back as the third century, have been the subject of scholarly exchanges among a handful of researchers in China and elsewhere. They know it was used in Hunan's Jiangyong County, in south central China about 200 miles northwest of Guangzhou, and believe it was limited to what is now Jiangyong's Shungjian Xu Township, which includes Pumei and these days has a population of around 19, 000 people. But even that is not certain.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Like the "Mothers of Many Young Siblings" e-mail group? :-) Undercover female bonding in the 21st century!
But seriously, this is fascinating, and I wish the article had included a picture of the script.
This sounds similar.
Nope. I think you'd be a good one to write the book.
You mean like the move to call Joseph Stalin, 'Uncle Joe'?
I'm not telling!
geeze- bit of a stretch, don't you think?
This is the point that got my attention. More like Western alphabets (or Korean).
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