an unprintable combination of the sacred and the profane

Posted by Victor Mair

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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

• "Online lookup tool for Vietnamese character usages" (1/10/26)
• Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia:  The Making of National Languages", Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751.
• "Women's writing: dead or alive" (10/2/20)
• "Women's Romanization for Hong Kong" (8/17/19)
• "The sociolinguistics of the Chinese script" (8/20/17)
• "Misogyny as reflected in Chinese characters" (12/25/15)
• "Women's words" (2/2/16)
• "Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)
• "Nüshu" Wikipedia
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand" (9/22/16)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 2 " (11/30/16)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 3 " (2/25/17)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 4" (4/21/17)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 5" (5/15/19)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 6" (6/17/19)
• "More Chinese menu shorthand" (12/16/25)
• "More Chinese menu shorthand, part 2: the future of the Chinese writing system" (12/23/25)
• "Hong Kong-specific characters and shorthand" (3/15/15), with links to relevant websites for restaurant shorthand characters
• "General Tso's chikin" (6/11/13), especially in the comments
• "Writing: from complex symbols to abstract squiggles" (6/11/19)
• "Character amnesia yet again: game (almost) over" (4/28/22)
• "Womanless" (11/11/21) — profound panoply of 100 sinographs with the 女 ("woman") semantophore by a woman artist
• "A revolution in Sinitic language conceptualization and learning" (1/7/21)

Oracle bone form of 女

• 
• (WP)

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)

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