I
’ve been in the habit of saying that the Chinese minority script Nüshu (the word means “women’s writing”) is, or was, the only script to have been invented and used solely by women, but as usual, life is more interesting, and I have been giving out false information. There have in fact been, in one sense or another, at least five women’s scripts.
Advertisement
Nüshu, from China — Reaching its peak during the latter part of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), Nüshu characters, adapted from standard Chinese, were used exclusively among women in rural Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. Unlike standard Chinese script, Nüshu writers valued characters written with very fine, almost threadlike, lines, because the women users could not afford the standard writing brush or ink, and instead used slivers of bamboo dipped in water mixed with soot. They referred to the leggy result as “mosquito writing.”
This make-do approach, combined with the repressive environment women endured and the personal, private details it expressed, underlies almost every aspect of Nüshu.
One glimpse into this culture is offered by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon composer Tan Dun’s multimedia performance work “Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women,” inspired by Jiangyong’s folk songs, mainly the minority (Yao ethnic) music and Sinicized Yao women’s bridal laments. He spent several years in a remote village in his native province of Hunan; recorded over 200 hours of audio and video; and created a work for orchestra, recorded voices, and projected still and video images.
The music is by turns dramatic, plaintive, reflective, melancholy, and grief-stricken, but it is the video images of the (mostly elderly) women singing in Nüshu and the circumstances of their singing that demonstrate its social context, meaning, and poignancy. The songs capture a world of concealed emotion: mothers losing daughters, daughters losing mothers, sisters losing each other. It reflects a social web so torn, so desperate, it needed a secret language to bear such emotional weight.
After the Communist Revolution of 1949, Nüshu slowly fell out of use as women were granted equal access to state-sponsored public education. Moreover, Nüshu was condemned as a “witch’s script” during the Cultural Revolution, and many texts and artifacts were burned. Yang Huanyi, the last native writer and speaker of Nüshu, died in 2004.
Scholars in both China and the West are working to revive the script, and in 2002, Nüshu was added to the Chinese National Register of Documentary Heritage. A Nüshu museum was built on Puwei Island, Jiangyong County, in May 2007, and at least two typographers (both female) are working to create Nüshu fonts, while a few calligraphers are starting to use the script, in some cases teaching it only to
female students.
Hiragana, from Japan — Hiragana was disregarded by the educated and elites, who preferred the perceived sophistication of the kanji system imported from China. Historically, in Japan, the regular script (kaisho) form of the characters was used by men and called otokode, “men’s writing,” while the cursive script (sōsho) form of the kanji was used by women. Barred from male educational disciplines, court women used hiragana for personal communications and literature. From this comes the alternative name of onnade, or “women’s writing.” For example, The Tale of Genji and other early novels by female authors used hiragana extensively or exclusively.
Amkeul, from Korea — The Koreans had a similar belief that Chinese characters were superior — superior, in this case, to the Hangul script created in the 1440s. Until well into the 20th century, Korea’s elite preferred to write using Chinese characters, and according to some accounts, they referred to the Korean alphabet scornfully as amkeul, meaning “women’s script,” though of course in reality both men and women used it.
Vaybertaytsh or Mashket, primarily from Eastern Europe — While the three preceding scripts represent a class distinction as much as a gender one, the same cannot be said of Vaybertaytsh or Mashket, a semi-cursive script/typeface for the Yiddish alphabet. Here the distinction is a complex mix of gender, education, language, and religious practice. Hebrew square script was used for classical texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, but thanks to gender-based education, women could at best read only Yiddish. From the 16th until the 19th century, then, Vaybertaytsh/Mashket was primarily used in texts for and by Jewish women, ranging from folktales to women’s supplications and prayers, to didactic works.
Dedabruli, from Georgia — “In Georgia,” posted Thomas Wier, a Caucasologist, “there used to be a form of script derived from Mkhedruli called დედაბრული ხელი [or] Dedabruli xeli, ‘maternal hand’ used almost exclusively by women from the southwestern Georgian regions of Guria and Ajaria.”
In this case, even though the script was truly a women’s script, the motivation was cultural, religious, and linguistic — another secret script in response to conquest and suppression.
“During the Ottoman rule,” explains the website of the Khariton Akhvlediani Museum of Ajara, “the population of Adjara was obliged to serve in the Ottoman military service and to wear a compulsory Muslim chador. The chador covered the woman’s face and body. . . . A secret Georgian scrift named ‘Dedabruli’ was used among old Adjaran women. In this [script], the relatives contacted each other so as not to lose the Georgian language and religion.”
Advertisement
According to the article “The Digital Corpus of Kobuletian-Adjarian ‘Dedabruli’ Manuscripts,” the script was modified from Mkhedruli to feature “angled letters, vowels, not separating words, not using punctuation marks.” That sounds simple, but it suggests two important points: first, a secret script shouldn’t be too difficult or far removed from familiar written forms, and second, that to Ottomans, the Mkhedruli script was already unfamiliar. As for the name of the scrıpt, Dedabruli means “specific to an old woman,” and Heli means “handwriting” — thus Dedabruli heli means “old-woman writing.” Why specifically old, I wonder?
Tim Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which aims to create a list of the world’s writing systems, identifying every script currently in use and assessing its degree of health or vulnerability.
Advertisement
Related Articles
Nüshu is a one-of-a-kind writing system from ancient China that was passed down through generations of women. Now, a cultural movement aims to revive this…
→ Continue Reading
