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International Mother Language Day
21 February
International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by
UNESCO's General Conference in November 1999. The International Day has been
observed every year since February 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural
diversity and multilingualism. Languages are the most powerful instruments
of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. All moves
to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to
encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop
fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world
and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue. ____________________________________________________________________ |
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Edward
Coty / The Washington Post Hu
Mei Yue teaches nushu in Pumei Village in south central China. |
Washington Post
By
Edward Cody
PUMEI
VILLAGE, China - 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 after marriage. 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 who learned as a girl and 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."
Wispy, elongated letters
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 have survived offer a unique chronicle of
these private lives long ago. Today, young 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 3rd 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.
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What seems clear is that nushu was fostered by the
region's ancient custom of "sworn sisters," whereby village girls
would pledge one another fealty and friendship forever. The tight sorority,
which included growing up together in cobbled village lanes and gathering with
adult women to weave and embroider, inevitably was shattered when the time for
marriage came. Tradition dictated that a bride go away to her groom's home --
and that is where nushu came in.
Three days after the wedding, the
adolescent bride would receive a "Third Day Book," a cloth-bound
volume in which her sworn sisters and her mother would record their sorrow at
losing a friend and daughter and express best wishes for happiness in the
married life that lay ahead. The first half-dozen pages contained these laments
and hopes, written in nushu that the groom could not read. The rest were left
blank for the bride to record her own feelings and experiences -- in nushu --
for what would become a treasured diary.
The sworn sisterhood tradition in
this region has led some scholars to speculate that nushu developed as a secret
language for lesbians, according to Zhao Liming, a literature professor at
Tsinghua University in Beijing who helped bring nushu to researchers' attention
in the 1980s and is one of the foremost authorities on it.
"But that is not true,"
she said in an interview. "They just wanted a way to express
themselves." She added: "Women needed a spiritual life. They could
not write Chinese, but they wanted to express their feelings."
Most important to the women who
learned it, sometimes memorizing letters written on the palms of their hands
because of a lack of paper, nushu liberated them from illiteracy.
The way nushu came to light some
20 years ago also has been clouded in competing theories.
Lin Lee Lee at the University of
Minnesota has written that a Jiangyong County woman visiting relatives in
Beijing in 1982 astounded them by singing and then writing a language and
script they could not understand. The relatives passed along their amazement to
scholars, she said in a conference presentation, and research into the strange
female writing system began.
But Zhou Shuoyi, 78, a
self-described countryside intellectual who lives in nearby Yongzhou city, said
he knows better, and he explained why.
'Educate the Girls'
One of his ancestors, a grandmother six generations back, wrote a poem entitled
"Educate the Girls." The poem, handed down from generation to
generation, was translated into nushu by some local village women, he said, and
his aunt brought the nushu version to his father's house sometime in the 1920s
as a subject of curiosity.
Zhou's father, a schoolteacher,
was impressed by the strange writing he could not understand and urged the
young Zhou to investigate. Later, working for the Jiangyong County cultural
department in the 1950s, Zhou said he discovered a number of elderly peasant
women still mastered nushu. A speaker of the Tuhua dialect, he was also able to
get a whiff of what nushu was about -- and what a cultural discovery there was
to make.
"At that time, many
grandmothers could sing it, write it and read it," he said in an
interview, sipping green tea, smiling with satisfaction and arching his bushy
black eyebrows under a flat golfer's hat. He added, "In society at that
time, there was injustice between men and women, and women needed this language
as a way to express themselves."
After further research, Zhou
reported his findings to authorities in Beijing. But by then the Cultural
Revolution had convulsed China. As an intellectual, Zhou said, he was branded a
rightist and forced to halt his work. Red Guard zealots destroyed the nushu
documents he had painstakingly accumulated.
"But the stuff in here could
not be burned," he smiled, pointing at his head and its tufts of white hair.
So in 1979, when calm had
returned, Zhou said he went back to work at a local museum and resumed his
interest in nushu, eventually learning to read and write.
Zhou collected more samples and
broadened his understanding of the little-known phenomenon. In 1982, he said,
he wrote a book about the region's culture, including a section on nushu. When
the Hunan provincial government published the book, scholars from relatively
nearby Wuhan, from faraway Beijing and eventually even from abroad started dropping
by. Nushu had been discovered.
"Now a lot of people are
studying it and a lot of people come here to ask about it," he said.
Zhao said that over the last 20
years she has guided a number of graduate students, Chinese and foreign, in
studying nushu at Tsinghua. Estimates of its contemporary vocabulary range from
670 to 1,500 words. A dozen of Zhao's students recently started compiling them
in a dictionary. The students include three young men, she specified with a
smile.
But aside from scholars, Zhao and
Zhou said, fewer than 10 people can fluently read and write nushu. Yang, the
98-year-old, has little time left. Several other women in Jiangyong County who
can read and write, or at least read, also have neared the end of their lives.
'Like a flower'
Local authorities nevertheless have seized on nushu's cultural value, and on
its tourism potential. An $80,000 school and museum went up last year here in
Pumei, where Hu Mei Yue, 42, visits every Saturday to teach nushu to whoever
among the village girls shows up for class.
Hu, who learned from her
grandmother, the late Gao Yinxin, also embroiders bags and handkerchiefs with
nushu writings to sell to tourists, who people here hope will start coming soon
to see what they have baptized "Pumei, Nushu Cultural Village."
"It's very interesting, and
Gao Yinxin left this valuable thing for our village," said Hu Linyin, 10,
a Pumei girl who recited nushu poetry and tried to puzzle out the writing under
teacher Hu's direction during a session Saturday.
"I don't know how people can write like this," remarked a classmate, Hu Cui Cui, 12, who said she can read about 200 words and write a few. "Each word is like a flower."
©
2007 The Washington Post Company
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