kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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 Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 3:08 pm Post subject: World's Only Gender-Specific Language |
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http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=258672&area=/insight/insight__body_language/
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Nushu, the secret women��s script of the Yao minority in China, was widely declared extinct last year, when its most famous user, Yang Huangyi died aged 92. But obituaries for the world��s only gender-specific language appear to have been premature.
This secret code, once used as a covert, intimate form of expression for heretical feelings about the frustration and loneliness of wives forced into arranged marriages in this remote community in southwest Hunan, is now being exploited in a way that is empowering and enriching women.
The impetus is economic and the results anything but romantic. But the reinvention of the embroidered script as a tourist moneyspinner is reaping dividends and a new generation of girls is studying the language not for a means of intimate communication but because it offers a chance to earn more than their brothers and fathers.
It was not always so. For much of its still sketchy history, Nushu, which means women��s writing, has been associated with persecution and misery. Its origins are obscure. Romantically minded linguists trace it back to a concubine of an emperor of the Song dynasty (960 to 1279), who is said to have used the secret script to write to sisters and friends outside the court.
A more prosaic explanation is that Nushu is a remnant of a 4 000-year-old language stamped out elsewhere by the first emperor of China, Qin Shihuang, who decreed one standardised mandarin script as a means to unite the country. Any man who used an alternative writing style was put to death. But women were not considered important enough to warrant an application of the law. |
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