Women's script wins in the end

January 19, 2026 @ 7:56 am · Filed by under Language and gender, Language reform, Writing systems

« previous post | next post »

Compared to the previous Julesy presentation, "This might be the most hated film in Korea" (see "Hangul and Buddhism" [1/16/26]), today's video is tame, but the consequences of what she describes — the advent of a phonetic script to replace a logographic / morphosyllabic script — were profound.

Let's face it:  Chinese characters / sinographs (hanzi / kanji / hanja / hántự 漢字) are difficult to master and they are multitudinous, so hard to maintain.  It takes a lot of time and effort to be proficient in them, especially when their use was restricted to writing the long dead Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic (hànwén / kanbun / hanmun / hánvăn 漢文), and there were no conventions for employing them to compose in vernacular (viz., write the way you speak) until the Buddhists legitimized such writing.  Although Julesy doesn't say so explicitly, that is the gist (the subtext) of her narrative:  writing with hanja was a bear, and it was androcentric.  

I don't want to put words in Julesy's mouth, but I will add that I believe scribalism — throughout history — except in extremely rare circumstances, before modern times was essentially reserved for men.  It was a virtue for women to be illiterate, and it was a vice for them to be literate.  Think of Elizabeth Wayland Barber's seminal volume:  Women's Work, The First 20,000 Years:  Women, Cloth, and Society In Early Times (1994). 

In East Asia, we have documented that women were proponents / practitioners of easier (phonetic) writing systems, e.g., nǚshū 女書 ("women's writing") in late imperial southern China, created and used by female commoners; onna-de おんなで /  女手 ("women's hand", i.e., hiragana syllabary), used by Lady Murasaki Shikibu to write The Tale of Genji in 11th-century Japan; and now we're learning that, throughout the more than five centuries of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910), it was women who kept alive the flickering flame of King Sejong's brilliant invention of Hangul.

In terms of gender (im)balance in society, without the slightest doubt, China — now, as in the past (except for 609-705 AD and 1861-1908) — is an androcentric polity: 

Currently, the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo, its top decision-making body, has zero women members, marking the first time in 25 years this has happened, following the retirement of Sun Chunlan in 2023 and no female appointments in 2022. Historically, only six women have ever served as full members of the Politburo, and none have ever sat on the even more powerful Politburo Standing Committee. (AIO)

Korea, North and South, has a phonetic script — Hangul; Japan has three phonetic scripts — hiragana, katakana, and romaji (and we are all very much aware that it has a female prime minister — the Communist Party of China won't let us forget that for one moment). 

Keep your eye on the Chinese Politburo and its Standing Committee.  If ever a woman (or women) should be appointed to either body, especially the latter one, the chances of China acquiring an official phonetic script will be greatly enhanced.  My prognostication for the future phoneticization of writing in China may seem somewhat bizarre, but it has a basis in historical reality.

The stark male dominance of the CCP Politburo and its Standing Committee — at a deep psychological level — is an index of anti-phoneticism in writing.

—

As my omniscient Mother used to say, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it".

 

Selected readings

 

Oracle bone form of 女

Pictogram (象形): a woman with breasts kneeling or standing. In the modern form, the pictogram is reversed from the Oracle Bone script form, and is "facing" toward the right edge of the character: the enclosed area (bounded on the right side by the downward-curving second stroke of the modern form) is the remnant of the figure's right breast, while the figure's left breast has disappeared.

Graphically cognate to 母 (mǔ, “mother”) and 毋, which has developed similarly, but also includes dots for nipples and has retained both breasts. Compare Egyptian .

 

Etymology

From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *naq (“woman”). Compare Tibetan ཉག་མོ (nyag mo, “woman”) (Hill, 2019)

(Wiktionary)

January 19, 2026 @ 7:56 am · Filed by under Language and gender, Language reform, Writing systems


12 Comments

  1. Philip Taylor said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 9:35 am

    When you say (write) "the chances of China acquiring an official phonetic script will be greatly enhanced", Victor, is Hanyu Pinyin not "an official phonetic script" ? Ever since starting to learn Mandarin Chinese some 20+ years ago, I have always believed that Hanyu Pinyin was (and is) "the official phonetic script" of Mandarin Chinese ("putonghua"). And whilst I don't for one second regard Wikipedia as authoritative, it is perhaps worth noting that it states (in part) "Hanyu Pinyin, […], officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet" and "Pinyin is the official romanization system used in China, Singapore, and Taiwan".

  2. wgj said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 10:25 am

    The last female politician in Communist China who (publicly) cared about language was … Jiang Qing (AKA Madam Mao)?

  3. Victor Mair said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 10:35 am

    Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai wanted to develop Pinyin as an official phonetic script for China, and they enlisted Zhou Youguang (1906-2017) to lead a team of linguists and language reformers to develop such a romanization. It would have become a reality had not Stalin talked them out of it. In the end, and up to now, it was only allowed to become a tool for phonetic annotation. See Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (2006).

    Nonetheless, as I have pointed out endlessly, through creeping digraphia, romanized inputting, informal messaging, and other means, pinyin is gradually becoming a de facto — though still not official — romanization for Mandarin / Putonghua.

  4. Chris Button said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 12:46 pm

    I wouldn't call rōmaji a "phonetic script". It's just the term used to refer to the transliteration of Japanese writing in the Roman alphabet.

  5. Stephen Goranson said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 12:57 pm

    Yiddish, Mame Loshn, early on, was often consider a language for women.

  6. Victor Mair said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 3:16 pm

    Noun

    mameloshen (uncountable)

    The Yiddish language.

    Etymology

    From Yiddish מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn), meaning "mother tongue".

    Wiktionary

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mameloshen

  7. Coby said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 1:46 pm

    I watched Julesy's video with subtitles on, and while the transcription of common words was mostly OK, that of names (and exotic words like Hangul and Confucian) is badly mangled. This is the opposite of my experience in watching Premier League soccer on Peacock; here the names — many of them (especially the African ones) as exotic as they come — always come out right, but common words (especially if spoken in some out-of-the way British accent) are often laughable.

  8. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 6:18 pm

    Re: wiktionary on "女" — "a woman with breasts kneeling or standing. In the modern form, the pictogram is reversed from the Oracle Bone script form, and is 'facing' toward the right edge of the character" etc.

    can't find any vaguely accurate claim here… those are arms not breasts. nothing is "reversed". etc.

  9. Chris Button said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 7:42 pm

    … those are arms not breasts. nothing is "reversed". etc.

    Indeed. And they are not just arms. They are bound arms. In some graphs containing "女", the arms are even bound at the back instead. Some scholars have suggested that 女 originally depicted a slave. I think that is correct.

    Many oracle-bone form appear facing in either direction. It makes no difference. Rotating a form 90 degrees can make a difference though (e.g., 目 vs 臣).

  10. Martin Schwartz said,

    January 19, 2026 @ 11:02 pm

    @Stephen Goranson and Victor Mair: Indeed,
    Mameloshn (in my parental dialects Mamelushn), with syllabic n, just means Yiddish as a homesy language.
    That it was early on consider[ed] a woman's language is news to me.
    Source? There was something called "taytsh" (etymologically
    'German', but not synchronically, "daytsh" being Yiddish for 'German'), referring to an archaic Yiddish used by women in place of the Hebrew of the prayer book. The term "Ladino" has a parallel history. My mother had some taytsh prayerbooks, of which she was fond.
    Martin Schwartz

  11. Stephen Goranson said,

    January 20, 2026 @ 7:22 am

    @Martin Schwartz. I'm in over my head, as I might could have written "was considered [only] by some…."
    From a YIVO Encyclopedia bio of Shmuel Niger:
    "Perhaps his most significant and enduring scholarly essay is “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin” (Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader; 1913). In this pioneering essay, Niger adopted a feminist approach to examine the role of women in Jewish literature and religious practice, arguing that alongside the exclusively masculine world of Talmudic study there emerged and flourished a distinctively feminine Jewish spirituality nourished more by the Bible and agadah than halakhah."
    https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1117

  12. David Morris said,

    January 23, 2026 @ 6:05 am

    Hanja v hangeul on the main name board of the main gate of Seoul's main palace: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/koreanheritage/20260123/hangeul-chinese-characters-or-both-long-battle-over-gwanghwamuns-nameboard

RSS feed for comments on this post