Nu-Shu

Douglas G. Wilson douglas at NB.NET
Wed Feb 21 09:27:37 UTC 2001


It seems there have been films and books about Nu Shu, which I guess means
"women's writing". There are many Web entries. I don't know anything about
it myself. Sometimes things get exaggerated in popular culture and on the
Web, of course. Somebody once said that Nu Shu is a simplified form of
Chinese with "only" 7000 characters ... this may be an error; 7000 is a
large number for an educated Chinese man or woman, I think ... this would
be like introducing a simplified English which is "easy to learn because it
has only 70,000 words" ....

Nu Shu is extinct or virtually so, apparently.

The female linguist SF author might be Suzette Haden Elgin, who wrote a few
books along this line.

-- Doug Wilson



More information about the Ads-l mailing list