![\"\"](\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/caodai1.jpg\" "\\"Click")
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This immediately reminded me of Square Word Calligraphy<\/a> (writing English words in the shape of a square, like Chinese characters), originally created by Xu Bing in 1994, a new version of which<\/a> was developed by David B. Kelley in 2012.<\/p>\n Before tackling the \"characters\" in vertical columns on the left and right, let's see what sort of text this is.<\/p>\n At the top it reads: \"Cao Dai Great Way\" (Cao Dai<\/a> is the popular, monotheistic religion in the Mekong delta). The large red letters in the middle say \"True Teachings of the Great Vehicle (Mahayana<\/a>)\". For more on the Cao Dai, see Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (1983) by Hue Tam Tai.<\/p>\n Our text is a Vietnamese prayer book. Here is a rendering in Chinese characters and English of the horizontal lines on the cover:<\/p>\n \u9ad8\u53f0\u5927\u9053<\/p>\n \u7167 . \u660e<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n \u5927\u4e58\u771f\u6559<\/p>\n first republishing Now on to the vertical columns, where the alphabetical Vietnamese is made to look like Chinese; it is a very common ploy to link new texts to ancient (read \"Chinese\") and thus sacred texts. The blocks on the periphery are formed by squeezing the Vietnamese letters that make up normal written syllables into a square matrix so that they appear to be Chinese characters. If you look carefully, you can even see the tone marks. Most are too stylized to be read with ease, and few people try to read them anyway. They are primarily decorative.<\/p>\n Steve O'Harrow explains:<\/p>\n This is an attempt to write modern Romanized Vietnamese [qu\u1ed1c ng\u1eef] in something that approximates the flavor of what the Vietnamese usually call \"ch\u1eef nho\" or \"ch\u1eef h\u00e1n,\" i.e., Sino-Vietnamese. Given that it is a Cao \u0110\u00e0i religious tract and that Cao \u0110\u00e0i is highly eclectic, it's not too surprising that they would find it \u00e6sthetically pleasing to refer in some way to a long-gone classical past which 99% of their adherents are in no way capable of deciphering (not unlike most modern Vietnamese). I have often seen this kind of faux-Chinese writing in places like restaurant signs and on clothing shops catering to the romantic tourist trade in Hanoi and TPHCM [VHM: Ho Chi Minh City] – It's kind of like \"Ye Olde Englishe\" on pub signs in London.<\/p>\n Here are a couple of examples of the way the \"squaring\" of the words works.<\/p>\n C H I \u1ebe U<\/strong> = first word on the left<\/p>\n
\n\u5929\u7406\u5b9d (name of publisher)
\nSan Jose, California\u2014USA
\nYear \u7532\u5b50 — 1984<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n