
Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by women (2017) - diodorus
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nushu-chinese-script-women
======
dwohnitmok
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/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7...](https://www.ixueshu.com/document/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7f9386.html)
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
> 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.

~~~
hnnmzh
I share the same feeling with you, but I gradually grow out of it. Why? it
happens all the time. Information will decay (and it's probably a Poisson
process).

Let's start from events happened in the ancient past

1\. 尚书，the Book of Documents

It has been largely lost. The "New Text" version is only a portion left. The
"Recovered Old Text" version was made up by someone. It was said the there
used to be 3240 articles and Confucius reduced it to 120 articles. Where did
the rest go?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents)

2\. Also it was mentioned in the Book of Documents that "唯殷先人，有典有冊"(my
translation: your Yin ancestors have scrolls and books).

Yin is another name of Shang
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty)

So where did those books go?

Where did the Xia and earlier documents go?

3\. Needless to say: the First Emperor burned a lot of books.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars)

Interestingly, the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips are documents preserved prior to the
First Emperor burning of the books.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips)

Also I think it's "lucky" that Qin reunified China. Qin uses Small Seal
Scripts which is closer to the Large Seal Scripts that Zhou uses. The other
states? Their font changed too much. Chinese would have been different had one
of the other states won.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script)

BTW the Zhongshan state's scripts are very artistic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_(state)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_\(state\))

[https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD)

[http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm](http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm)

[https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%...](https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%89%E5%99%A8)

[https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B...](https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%89%E5%99%A8/2229639/0/f11f3a292df5e0fee1ba9c445c6034a85fdf72d0?fr=lemma&ct=single#aid=1298159&pic=b3b7d0a20cf431ad891e467c4b36acaf2fdd98a2)

4\. The Nine Cauldrons

Where did they go? Lost in the river? When the Zhou king left the capital, he
probably brought a lot of documents with him. Where did they go?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons)

5\. 石鼓文， The Stone Drum Writings

I call it China's Rosetta Stone.

They were still intact by Song dynasty. People cherished them so much and even
embedded gold to the strokes. What happened next? When the northern invaders
came, they cut out the gold pieces and in the process destroyed the writings.
Sigh....

[https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87)

I will stop here. There are so many of these events in more recent history.
It's the nature I guess....

~~~
k_sze
Thanks for all of those examples.

The Zhongshan scripts are beautiful indeed.

However, the major difference that I perceive between the Cultural Revolution
(CR) and most of your examples is that in the case of the CR, we're talking
about _millions_ of people _deliberately_ destroying stuff out of a mix of
spite, arrogance, and folly. Whereas, bar the presence of evidence to the
contrary, I would assume some of the artifacts you mentioned were simply lost
to entropy. The ancient Chinese lacked the technology/know-how/capability to
preserve those things. Circumstances may have forced them to abandon some of
those artifacts. They probably did their best, in carving those things in
relatively durable material like bronze and marble.

The only comparable example among those that you listed would be the burning
of books and burying of scholars. (I know the burying of scholars is
disputed.) But even then, it was mostly an idea that probably only very few
people believed was good. The other people who cooperated (by turning in
hiding scholars and hidden scrolls to the authority) probably did it out of
fear for punishment.

~~~
hnnmzh
> we're talking about millions of people deliberately destroying stuff out of
> a mix of spite, arrogance, and folly.

> ......But even then, it was mostly an idea that probably only very few
> people believed was good.

Very good points.

I agree the Culture Revolution has caused great damage. I don't think it
shifted the core of "Chinese culture". It was "rectified" quickly and today
people understand how bad it was. OTOH, The New Culture Movement had probably
caused more impact. I'm not saying the NCM is bad but its effects are
significant and long lasting.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement)

Please let me know your view on it.

------
teej
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.

------
_Nat_
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
One term for such is a Cant
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_%28language%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_%28language%29)

------
dwohnitmok
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.

------
benrbray
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
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
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.

------
knolax
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
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
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
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.

~~~
crimsonalucard
That's true, but as a person who learned Chinese the phono semantic part of
the word didn't really help or is even taught in Chinese school.

I'm talking about Chinese school for ABCs where everybody is assumed to know
how to speak Chinese. We are literally just taught the radical and we memorize
the word and sound without being taught the phonetic part of it.

~~~
knolax
> Chinese school for ABCs

That's your problem, most American Born Chinese can barely pronounce their own
last names right; "Chinese Schools" in America are mostly just a formality.

~~~
crimsonalucard
>That's your problem, American Born Chinese can barely pronounce their own
last names right

This is an insult. An almost racial and cultural one as well. For some reason
I don't have enough karma to report you but I humbly request someone else to
do so. This is not true at all. Many American Born Chinese are Bilingual and
speak both languages equally well.

>"Chinese Schools" in America are mostly just a formality.

Chinese schools in America are run by Chinese people who immigrated here so
that their children can learn. Almost every ABC went to one. They teach it to
their kids the same way it was taught to them.

What in the world do you mean by just a "formality." You mean to say that it's
not legit?

------
paggle
“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
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)

------
drcode
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
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
> 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
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.)

~~~
inimino
Yes, that would be deciphering in a sense... in a sense to use "decipher" for
"translate" is already an analogy, since "cipher" means to calculate or to
write in a code, and "decipher" means to reverse the code... which is not
exactly what's happening here if the language was not enciphered but merely
obscure, but it's a natural enough extension of the meaning of the word.

------
chromeaway
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)

------
growlist
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.

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

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

~~~
chewxy
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

