Talk:Nüshu/Archive 1

M. He
Who is "Mrs. He"? There is no other reference to this individual. --OneTopJob6 02:28, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Number of characters
The article currently says that 600-700 characters have been recovered. I have several sources that say 2000 have been recovered. Which is correct? Uucp 13:53, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


 * There are severals thousands, but most are graphic variants and not separate characters. kwami 23:23, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

logographic/phonetic
There seems to be confusion over the Chinese written language here. It says Chinese is logographic but Nu Shu is phonetic. I think this is wrong in two ways. First, the Chinese written language is both logographic and phonetic. Each character represents both meaning and sound - in the case of the latter it represents a single phoneme or syllable. This is fundamental actually, otherwise it's not really a language that involves "complete writing" and counts only as art or semasiography etc. Second, judging by the picture given of nu shu, it is also both phonetic and logographic. I say this because the example given is written with the same characters as ordinary chinese uses (albeit right to left and slightly different stylistically). I can see the character that means "woman" on the right and the one for "book" on the left but I have never heard of nu shu before - these are logographic characters. Don't want to change it unless agreed though. Thanks
 * You are partially correct. The mistake is in the word phonetic, which should be phonemic. Nushu is syllabic, like Japanese kana (which until WWII also had numerous graphic variants), or the official version of Yi, not logosyllabic, despite the origin of many of the glyphs from Chinese. kwami 18:01, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Pronounciation?
I noticed that there is no IPA given for 'Nü Shu' - how do you pronounce it?
 * In Beijing Mandarin, it's . That's described in the article Pinyin. kwami 18:00, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Origin of spelling?
This seems to be the only site on the Web that reflects the language's name as "Nü Shu". Elsewhere (supposedly reliable sources such as the BBC and The Guardian, for example) have written it as "Nu Shu" or "Nushu". What is correct? Watman 11:49, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The Pinyin transliteration given here with tone marks, nǚshū, is correct. The diaresis is often ignored, just as our header "Nü Shu" ignores tone marks. kwami 18:00, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh, and you can write it as one word if you like. Nǚ shū as a phrase, "woman's writing", would be written as two words, but as the proper name for a specific script you could argue it should be one. kwami 18:04, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * As long as you don't spell it "Nu Shooz". --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 03:38, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Since most sources (including documentation from users of the script working on encoding it in the UCS) write Nüshu, I have moved the article from Nü Shu (which I've really never seen anywhere). ISO 15924 is giving Nüshu the code Nshu (should be live in a few days) -- Evertype·✆ 10:44, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Good call -- "女书" is single word, so Nüshu is definitely the most appropriate spelling. BabelStone (talk) 19:45, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * However, we now contrast it with Nan Shu 'Men's Writing' as two words. — kwami (talk) 21:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Why would the hypothetical Nan Shu (no hits on Wikipedia) be written as two words? For me that would also be a single word, Nanshu. BabelStone (talk) 23:20, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

missing fundamental data
We apparently don't know which language Nüshu is used for, nor how many glyphs it contains. One ref says 600-700, but another says that 1800 have been collected (graphemes? allographs?), and s.o. added, tho w/o ref, that this is only 'a small fraction' of the total. Both issues need to be resolved. — kwami (talk) 00:21, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I've added in ref'd discussion of the language, which is an unclassified dialect of Chinese (not Xiang, and probably closer to Yue). As to how many characters are there, how long is a piece of string? As a non-standardized script there are countless ways of writing any given syllable, and users often make up new characters by Nüshu-ifying Chinese characters (making them slanty).  The Chinese encoding proposal is an attempt to standardize the script and prescribe those characters that should be used and implicitly deprecate those characters that are not included in the proposal. I'll try to add some ref'd details about character numbers tomorrow. BabelStone (talk) 01:19, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Linming seems to be saying that half of the characters are logographic and half phonetic, but I'm having difficulty extracting any clear meaning from his chapter, so I tagged that part dubious. — kwami (talk) 01:45, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Women proficient in Nushu discovered by Endo Orie
Endo Orie claims that she has discovered two women who are able to write in Nushu (see here, here, and here), her claims are supported by a Beijing uni professor (曹志耘), see here. — kf8 16:40, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Not a ″secret women language″
Please add this quote to article: "The combination of female specificity and hanzi heterology has given nüshu a reputation as a “secret” form of writing that allowed rural women to construct a world protected from male intrusion. This is a misunderstanding. In rural Jiangyong, nüshu was both visible and audible; it was meant to be heard and shared through chanting or singing, and it was openly used by women of almost every age at various public occasions. But probably due to the rigid constraints of Confucian sexual and social mores, men did not take an interest in nüshu performances. As a result, apparently no action was taken by concerned authorities, either to hold back its circulation or to appreciate its existence and record it in local archives such as gazetteers. Nüshu thus continued to be practiced in rural Jiangyong while remaining unknown to the culture at large, giving it a mysterious quality."

Current state might cause misunderstanding.

Directionality and example
If Nüshu is left-to-right, why is the sample of the word Nüshu written right-to-left? Thisisnotatest (talk) 21:58, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Deleted text
What has happened to all that text deleted at 09:35, 21 June 2017?

Why was it deleted? What does OR mean in the note that it was deleted?

Was it seen as wrong information or what? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.159.121.73 (talk) 12:47, 21 June 2017 (UTC)


 * The content deleted from the Nüshu script article was basically an essay based on WP:OR and therefore didn't qualify to be in the article. ✂ --42.112.154.2 (talk) 06:55, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Hm
Interesting article at Quartz that could be used as a source, if anyone wants? DS (talk) 16:54, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Font support and directionality
I've made a couple changes to this page and to Unicode chart Nushu, specifically focused on adding support for Nüshu fonts. I've added CSS support for two Unicode fonts which allow the display of Nüshu text:


 * 1) Noto Sans Nushu, which not actually affiliated with Google's Noto fonts, but provides accurate and legible sans-serif glyphs for Nüshu encodings; and
 * 2) Unicode Nushu, which is less legible at small sizes, but serves as a usable fallback.

I've also commented out the  field from the infobox, which results in the infobox displaying 'Left-to-right' as the script's directionality. This assertion is directly contradicted by both the example image in the infobox and the article text, which notes:

"The script is traditionally written in vertical columns running from right to left, but in modern contexts it may be written in horizontal lines from left to right, just like modern-day Chinese."

Addressing this in the infobox would require edits to ISO 15924 direction, which specifies the left-to-right designation, and I'm not familiar enough with its parameters to know whether or not this is desirable, or whether there is a way to indicate this optional directionality therein ('Mixed' doesn't seem an appropriate parameter to me, but perhaps it would be an option). 104.246.222.35 (talk) 23:28, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Dead, extinct, or neither?
@Remsense, I noticed you're monitoring this page, so I was curious for your thoughts on this. The extinct language article (which should probably be linked) makes a distinction between a language being extinct (no first-language or second-language speakers) vs. just dead (only second-language speakers). The linguists I know hate the trope of languages being declared extinct when they're actually not, and I wonder if that's happening here. Per the article, Nushu still clearly has at least some people who can write it with some level of fluency.  Sdkb  talk 18:10, 26 March 2024 (UTC)


 * There's an important distinction between "language" and "writing system" also. I wouldn't really emphasize the "extinct" versus "dead" distinction with writing systems, since writing is a much more solid, comparative thing than spoken language. For example, people can decipher the spoken sounds the Etruscan script corresponds to much more successfully than they have then pieced together the Etruscan language itself, since we only have tiny fragments of textual evidence. Contrastingly, Tuhua is very much a living language, so it makes sense people have a firm understanding of how a phonetic writing system for it works. Remsense  诉  18:36, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Good point. Where does that leave us in terms of any changes that we might need to make? (I'm trying to get at least the lede in better shape prior to the upcoming Main Page appearance of the Hidden Letters DYK.)  Sdkb  talk 18:39, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Oh, I'll take a look at it today ASAP and fix what I can, and let you know if there's anything else. Thanks for the attention to this lovely bit of history. :) Remsense  诉  18:42, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

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