Friday 26 September 2003

language dies with woman


Yang Huanyi, China's last woman proficient in the mysterious Nushu language, died at her home last week. She was thought to be 98. Yang learned possibly the world's only female-specific language from seven sworn sisters as a girl. Nushu characters are structured by four kinds of strokes, including dots, horizontals, verticals and arcs. Linguists believe her death marks the end of a 400-year-old tradition in which women shared their innermost feelings through
codes incomprehensible to men.
... Beautiful story. But I wonder -- so women normally speak in codes comprehensible to men?

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