Talk:Nüshu

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M. He

Who is "Mrs. He"? There is no other reference to this individual. --OneTopJob6 02:28, 31 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Number of characters

The article currently says that 600-700 characters have been recovered. I have several sources that say 2000 have been recovered. Which is correct? Uucp 13:53, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There are severals thousands, but most are graphic variants and not separate characters. kwami 23:23, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

logographic/phonetic

There seems to be confusion over the Chinese written language here. It says Chinese is logographic but Nu Shu is phonetic. I think this is wrong in two ways. First, the Chinese written language is both logographic and phonetic. Each character represents both meaning and sound - in the case of the latter it represents a single phoneme or syllable. This is fundamental actually, otherwise it's not really a language that involves "complete writing" and counts only as art or semasiography etc. Second, judging by the picture given of nu shu, it is also both phonetic and logographic. I say this because the example given is written with the same characters as ordinary chinese uses (albeit right to left and slightly different stylistically). I can see the character that means "woman" on the right and the one for "book" on the left but I have never heard of nu shu before - these are logographic characters. Don't want to change it unless agreed though. Thanks

You are partially correct. The mistake is in the word phonetic, which should be phonemic. Nushu is syllabic, like Japanese kana (which until WWII also had numerous graphic variants), or the official version of Yi, not logosyllabic, despite the origin of many of the glyphs from Chinese. kwami 18:01, 2 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Pronounciation?

I noticed that there is no IPA given for 'Nü Shu' - how do you pronounce it?

In Beijing Mandarin, it's /nỳʂú/. That's described in the article Pinyin. kwami 18:00, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Origin of spelling?

This seems to be the only site on the Web that reflects the language's name as "Nü Shu". Elsewhere (supposedly reliable sources such as the BBC and The Guardian, for example) have written it as "Nu Shu" or "Nushu". What is correct? Watman 11:49, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Pinyin transliteration given here with tone marks, nǚshū, is correct. The diaresis is often ignored, just as our header "Nü Shu" ignores tone marks. kwami 18:00, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and you can write it as one word if you like. Nǚ shū as a phrase, "woman's writing", would be written as two words, but as the proper name for a specific script you could argue it should be one. kwami 18:04, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As long as you don't spell it "Nu Shooz". --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 03:38, 22 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since most sources (including documentation from users of the script working on encoding it in the UCS) write Nüshu, I have moved the article from Nü Shu (which I've really never seen anywhere). ISO 15924 is giving Nüshu the code Nshu (should be live in a few days) -- Evertype·✆ 10:44, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Good call -- "女书" is single word, so Nüshu is definitely the most appropriate spelling. BabelStone (talk) 19:45, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

However, we now contrast it with Nan Shu 'Men's Writing' as two words. — kwami (talk) 21:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Why would the hypothetical Nan Shu (no hits on Wikipedia) be written as two words? For me that would also be a single word, Nanshu. BabelStone (talk) 23:20, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

missing fundamental data

We apparently don't know which language Nüshu is used for, nor how many glyphs it contains. One ref says 600-700, but another says that 1800 have been collected (graphemes? allographs?), and s.o. added, tho w/o ref, that this is only 'a small fraction' of the total. Both issues need to be resolved. — kwami (talk) 00:21, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've added in ref'd discussion of the language, which is an unclassified dialect of Chinese (not Xiang, and probably closer to Yue). As to how many characters are there, how long is a piece of string? As a non-standardized script there are countless ways of writing any given syllable, and users often make up new characters by Nüshu-ifying Chinese characters (making them slanty). The Chinese encoding proposal is an attempt to standardize the script and prescribe those characters that should be used and implicitly deprecate those characters that are not included in the proposal. I'll try to add some ref'd details about character numbers tomorrow. BabelStone (talk) 01:19, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Linming seems to be saying that half of the characters are logographic and half phonetic, but I'm having difficulty extracting any clear meaning from his chapter, so I tagged that part dubious. — kwami (talk) 01:45, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Women proficient in Nushu discovered by Endo Orie

Endo Orie claims that she has discovered two women who are able to write in Nushu (see here, here, and here), her claims are supported by a Beijing uni professor (曹志耘), see here. — kf8 16:40, 27 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]