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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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....
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.
> 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.
We can think that this loss is inevitable, but still find it sad.
There was a Greek playwright called Aristophanes who wrote comedies in about 400 BC. Eleven survive to the present day, but we know he wrote at least forty. The eleven we have are really funny! I feel a mixture of annoyance and sadness that i will never get to read or see the other twenty-nine.
Think of all the comedies you'll never read because even knowledge of their author's existence is lost to time. This is just how the universe works and the real marvel is that we can preserve anything at all over these time spans.
Out of a population of people there will always be some who are as you say gullible and arrogant that will turn on their compatriots. As a data point, it is probably whatever percentage of American that still support the current POTUS.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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), 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.
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.
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.
>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?
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:
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.
> 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 ;-)).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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... 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
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.