By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog
On September 4, 2004, Yang Huanyi died at her home in Central China. She was 98 years old, and the last fluent practitioner of Nüshu, one of the oldest and most beautiful, and certainly one of the more intriguing languages in the world. (1) (2)
Nüshu, (女书), (literally, women’s writing and/or women’s script) is the only known language in the history of the world that was created by women and that was used and understood only by women, handed down for generations from mother to daughter. The origins of the language are lost in the mists of time, with scholars today debating almost every aspect of its existence, including its origin and creation. The few written works remaining today are at most around 100 years old, though some place the origin at more than 1,000 years ago.
Nüshu is what we today would term a ‘dead language’, one no longer in use, and one which, without the intervention of Providence, would have died and become extinct without even a funeral. This mysterious language was accidentally discovered only about 40 years ago. In the early 1980s a teacher accompanied his students to a remote area of China’s Hunan Province to study local customs and culture. During their studies, they found a strange calligraphy which they discovered no man could understand, with characters very different from Chinese letters and from any other script in the world.
Nüshu was a special form of writing and song that was used and understood only by the women in Jiangyong County in China’s Hunan Province, and in corners of three adjacent provinces. Despite its long history, it seemed that no one outside the area, including much of Hunan Province itself, had seen it or was even aware of its existence. Immediately recognising the importance of their discovery, the teacher sought help from professional linguists who formed a research group where they collected samples and recordings, and created a dictionary. Nüshu, which had been passed quietly from woman to woman for uncounted centuries, had now left its rural home with its secrets exposed, causing ripples of excitement both at home and abroad. Nüshu has been officially declared a World Heritage item, and listed as one of the world’s most ancient languages and the only exclusively female language ever discovered.
Because it was virtually a secret language, we can find no references to it in old documents or historical works, and no one outside the area appears to have been familiar with it. Yet that cannot be the entire story because in Nanjing in 1999 some coins were discovered which bore inscriptions in the characters of Nüshu, coins which had been minted by the Taiping government dating from the early to mid 1800s. These were legal coins, which means Nüshu must have been in some kind of official use during that period, but to date no documentation has been discovered. (People’s Daily News international edition dated March 2, 2000).
The End of a Tradition
Nüshu declined in the 1920s in the midst of various social and political changes, and use of the script was heavily suppressed by the Japanese during their invasion of China in the 1930s-40s because they feared it could be used to send secret messages. As well, during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the language was discouraged as a kind of feudal leftover in a time when the nation was trying to throw off two centuries of stagnation and bring itself into a modern world. More social and cultural changes occurred during the latter part of the 20th century, including the standardisation of the Mandarin language and simplification of the characters, resulting in the younger generation adopting Mandarin and abandoning Nüshu which then fell into disuse as the older women died.
It seems always true that as times change, especially with major social upheavals, our cultures and traditions evolve and sometimes dissipate. NüShu fell victim partially to the Cultural Revolution which was rewriting history for a new China, and simultaneous universal educational reforms focused on Mandarin and rendered NüShu redundant, so it ceased to be taught, and gradually disappeared from the culture of the time.
Nüshu in Daily Life
Using their script, the women wrote letters, poetry, and songs in books and on paper fans, and they often embroidered the script into cloth for handkerchiefs, scarves, aprons and other handicrafts. Instead of writing letters, they would often embroider poems and messages onto handkerchiefs to be delivered as essentially secret messages to their friends and relatives back home. In addition to poetry and songs, they wrote Nüshu in their prayers and chants to god, but perhaps the most notable use was in their letters and vows to each other as sworn sisters.
It was a tradition among the girls of this area to enter relationships with each other which were called Jiebai Zimei (結拝姉妹) or “sworn sisterhood” which entailed pledging commitment to female friends who were not biologically related but committed to a deep friendship. These sworn sisters were generally were much closer to each other than to their real sisters, and one of the main uses of NüShu was as a means of recording these lifelong friendships in letters and poetry.
These were serious relationships of emotional companionship, almost akin to marriage and expected to last for life. The girls would swear pledges to each other and share fortune and misfortune, a practice that played a very important role in the invention and dissemination of Nüshu. Much of the Nüshu writing and embroidery consisted of letters between sworn sisters, and there is reason to believe that the need for accurate expression of these emotional bonds was responsible for the creation of the language.
One of the more charming traditions involved books knows as San Chao Shu, (三朝书, literally third-day book) which were beautiful hand-made cloth-bound booklets written in Nüshu and to be given to a daughter or a sworn sister upon her marriage. In the traditional Chinese marriages of the time, a bride would join her husband’s family and would have to move, sometimes far away, perhaps rarely seeing her birth family or her sworn sisters again.
These lovely San Chao Shu were wedding gifts delivered on the third day after the young woman’s marriage, typically expressing fond hopes for the girl’s future happiness as well as describing the sorrows upon being parted from her. The first several pages were filled with songs and poems for the young woman leaving the village, while the remaining pages were left blank to be used as a personal diary. These books were looked upon as great treasures and were considered very personal, so much so that they were usually either burned or buried with the woman upon her death – a practice which explains the dearth of examples of NüShu extant today.
When we examine the NüShu writings available, we realise we are looking into not only the lives but the hearts of these village women, reflecting the deepest feelings and emotions in their hearts, a form of expression that became rooted in the consciousness of the women. These women created something by and for themselves, a language perfectly tailored to the needs of women for expression. The script is so feminine and the writing so descriptive that together they touch the souls of these sworn sisters, transmitting accurately through their letters, poems and songs their hopes and tears, their joy and despair.
Nüshu has been described as “A light of civilisation in history, an especially beautiful scenery in the history of women, a method to build a rare and valuable, and beautiful, spiritual kingdom unique to women”. Nüshu is a large measure of a rich folk culture, a product of the great Chinese civilisation, which was formed in a very special and complex cultural soil. One scholar wrote that now that Nüshu has withdrawn from the historical stage with the blessing of history, what remains today is “a rainbow of human civilisation”. (Zhao Liming)
It is more than fascinating that Nüshu could ever be created because, while the purpose of all language is to communicate, Nüshu was created as a language of emotion and feeling. This is so true that one Hunan woman, writing a poem in Nüshu, was asked why she didn’t write in Mandarin which would be easier. Her reply was that she couldn’t, that it was too daunting to even think about recording or expressing her feelings in another language but, using Nüshu, she could do it. Nüshu is not so much a language of the heart, but of the soul. One woman described her expressions in Nüshu as an ability to whisper her deepest hidden feelings, to describe not only tears, but “crimson-colored tears”.
It is well-known that different languages have different abilities to communicate concepts. There are German words – for example, schadenfreude – which cannot be translated into a single word in another language. Sometimes, a paragraph may be needed in one language to express a single word in another. With most languages, the expression of facts is easy, but feelings and emotions are more difficult to express verbally or in writing without resorting to much flowery vocabulary.
The conclusion that seems to fit the circumstances is that this valley of women in Hunan felt a need to express their emotional thoughts, feelings, desires, sorrows and hopes, and so created a language specifically for women which contained the vocabulary to do precisely that. And they expressed all those delicate and indefinable feelings through the vocabulary they created for Nüshu. If this assumption is accurate, it is not a surprise that no man could understand it nor that no man would be invited to understand it. Nüshu is entirely a language of emotion and feeling; perhaps the first (and only) time women were able to accurately express the secrets of their heart.
All Nüshu writings are from women to women, whether letter, song or poem, each an artifact of a unique woman’s culture reflecting and preserving the spiritual feelings of female friends. The language, a unique artistic wonder, was the basis not only for communication but for cohesion, creating as one author wrote, “a romantic spiritual kingdom based on the realistic feelings and sufferings of these women”. Simply put, the women needed a way to express themselves but, lacking the necessary tools in the common dialects, used their unique knowledge of their own hearts to create a new language with an appropriate subjective vocabulary to reflect female emotions. It was this that could create the scaffolding for the sworn sisters to swear their vows, almost like a secret female sorority. Nüshu is a great initiative of Chinese women and a contribution to human civilisation.
It is interesting to note that in all the Nüshu writings discovered, there are no love songs.
Many scholars have collected examples of the Nüshu script and created dictionaries of some repute, but my feeling is that a cat cannot be turned into a bird. In the case of Nüshu it is only in a very specific emotional environment that the true and complex sentiment of a group of characters can be understood. This cannot be translated into other languages which have no vocabulary for those sentiments. The words to describe subjective feelings of resonance with one’s sisters, as one of the basic needs of human spiritual life cannot be found in most dictionaries, especially those created by men.
For its part, the Nüshu script is exclusively feminine. If there is one striking sign of this language, it is the gender. Nüshu characters have a soft and flowing, quaint and unique, female beauty. Considering that this was a means to communicate privately, these lovely small letters were beautifully designed.
Many scholars, instead of focusing on the material issues of the language usage and intent, seem to busy themselves with similarities to Chinese or other characters. However, Chinese is a character language with each character representing an idea, or a word or part of a word. Nüshu on the other hand, is phonetic, with the characters (letters) representing sounds rather than concepts. They are not ideas, but pronunciations, as in most Western languages. It is primarily for this reason that I believe dictionaries and translations may be of limited use.
Nüshu characters are a primarily a storehouse of female culture, not a list of nouns. Nüshu has more than 2,000 characters, some of which have no spoken counterparts, and which display little mutual intelligibility with other languages. In addition to all the above, Nüshu has a full set of rules for layout with pronunciation, style, and a framework of grammar.
I stated above that scholars appear to focus entirely on elements that are almost irrelevancies in the overall picture. To my mind, there are two factors most important in the study of this language.
First is the female and feminine nature of the language, the emotional foundation, a language created by and for women apparently for the purpose of expressing the deepest and almost inexpressible feelings in their hearts.
The second is perhaps even more astonishing and more cause for wonder. How did a group of peasant women living in a remote valley in China’s Hunan Province 1,000 years ago, women who were possibly illiterate but who almost certainly had never attended a school of any sort, manage to create a full-fledged language with 60,000 words and rules of grammar, and an entirely new and very beautiful script designed to express those ‘inexpressible feelings’? That task today would be so daunting as to be almost impossible for even the most accomplished linguists, yet it was done.
Every Silver Lining has a Cloud
When Nüshu was first discovered, many foreign ‘scholars’ made their way to Hunan and looted the finest and oldest examples of the Nüshu writing, the San Chao Shu, and the embroidered artifacts, all of which were of immense historical and cultural significance to China. They are now gone forever because of this predatory “research”.
Additionally, too many foreigners have conducted research on Nüshu and produced a flood of papers and books which are wrong at best and fraudulent and insulting at worst. Nüshu has been the basis of several Western documentaries, all bad, all serving primarily to denigrate China and, in one way or another, to trash this beautiful historical artifact.
More disappointingly, many foreign so-called scholars have executed written and film works on Nüshu which are intended to be offensive, to denigrate yet another beautiful portion of Chinese cultural heritage. One author dismissed Nüshu as “a language designed for a culture of lesbians”, then claiming the Chinese national government moved to save the language from extinction only because it envisioned huge potential profits from cultural tourism.
Other uninformed ‘scholars’ state women learned this language because they were forbidden formal education and prohibited from learning Chinese. Some claim the women “rebelled” against a “grotesque male-dominated Confucian society”, the language emerging as a result of the conflict. Others view Nüshu through a feminist lens, forming imaginary Western parallels with “empowering women” by “strengthening their collective ego consciousness”. Some claim men disregarded the Nüshu language “in feudal China” since women were considered inferior, denied educational opportunities and condemned to social isolation with bound feet. And so on. Of all those I have seen, none exhibit any understanding of the cultural or social context, and none even recognise, much less appreciate, the primordial underlying elements.
I am therefore by design providing no Western links for any part of this article. I would strongly advise readers interested in Nüshu to avoid any website that is not physically in China and created by authoritative Chinese sources. There are dozens of foreign Nüshu websites purporting to be Chinese but which are primarily US-based and which have little or no accurate or factual information to provide.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.
His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
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Notes
(1) Last female-only Nüshu language speaker dies
September 24, 2004, China Daily
; http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-09/24/content_377436.htm
(2) China to reveal female-specific language to public. March 16, 2004;
http://en.people.cn/200403/16/eng20040316_137569.shtml
(3) Qinghua University Research Center of Ancient Chinese Characters
http://www.thurcacca.org/booksearch.html
(4) For Nüshu images:
(5) https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A5%B3%E4%B9%A6/608945?fr=aladdin
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The original source of this article is The Saker Blog
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, Blue Moon of Shanghai, 2021
A short life, well wasted ...
In a stone den was a poet Mr Shi, who loved eating lions and determined to eat ten. He often went to the market to watch lions. One day at ten o'clock, ten lions just arrived at the market. At that time, Mr Shi just arrived at the market too. Seeing those ten lions, he killed them with arrows. He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den. The stone den was damp. He had his servant wiping it. The stone den being wiped, only then did he try to eat those ten lions. While eating, he just realised that those ten lions were in fact ten stone-lion corpses. Try to explain this.
When ordinary people think of violence, they think of things like bombs exploding, gunfire, and brawls. Most dictionary definitions of “violence” mention physical harm or force. Academics, ignoring common usage, speak of “administrative violence,” “data violence,” “epistemic violence” and other heretofore unknown forms of violence. Philosopher Kristie Dotson defines the last of these as follows: “Epistemic violence in testimony is a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance.”
What Dotson calls “epistemic violence” isn’t violence according to ordinary usage or the dictionary. If intellectuals can commandeer the word “violence,” then presumably they can do the same with stronger words. So why not call epistemic violence “epistemic rape”? Indeed, why not “epistemic genocide”? After all, genocide is destroying a people in whole or in part, and part of destroying a people is destroying its voice. Maybe that can be done through subtle acts of silencing. This is absurd, of course, but there’s no principled way to stop moves like this if we accept coinages like “epistemic violence.”
The word “gaslighting” has also been abused in this way. The term originated with Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light, which was later adapted into movies in Britain and the United States, both named Gaslight. The plot centers around a woman who begins to lose her grip on reality because of her husband’s pathological lying. According to Dictionary.com, to “gaslight” someone is: “to cause (a person) to doubt his or her sanity through the use of psychological manipulation.” Gaslighting is characterized by pervasive, blatant lying. The perpetrator might confidently deny that the victim heard him say something that he clearly said moments ago.
Some intellectuals define “gaslighting” so loosely that it need not involve outright lying; this way, speech they dislike can be called “gaslighting.” Two professors of political science at Seattle University write: “Just as the process of white supremacy does not require those who are complicit to understand the racist nature of their actions, awareness is also not determinative of whether the process of racial gaslighting is taking place.”2 Examples of racial gaslighting, according to them, include dominant groups “tone policing” minorities who have every right to be angry about their oppression and—apparently—expressing any conservative opinion about race.
Philosopher Rachel McKinnon also does this. After accurately describing how the word “gaslighting” entered the language and what it is usually taken to mean, she writes:
However, this isn’t the kind of gaslighting I am interested in for the purposes of this chapter. Instead, I’m interested in the more subtle form, often unintentional, where a listener doesn’t believe, or expresses doubts about, a speaker’s testimony. In this epistemic form of gaslighting, the listener of testimony [sic] expresses doubts about the speaker’s reliability at perceiving events accurately.
McKinnon presents the following as a case of such “subtle” gaslighting. A trans woman, Victoria, thinks that James is deliberately failing to use her preferred pronouns, and pronounce her name correctly, in order to demean her. Her colleague, Susan, doubts this interpretation and suggests Victoria might be too emotional and primed to hear verbal slights (consistent with a stereotype about trans women). This denial of Victoria’s authoritative perspective supposedly renders Susan a gaslighter. Of course, since we all get things like this wrong, Susan might be doing the right thing by offering a different point of view. Even if Susan is misguided, her words are no more a subtle form of gaslighting than a wasp is a subtle form of wolf, or an insult is a subtle form of murder.
Because “gaslighting” is a label for a kind of bad behavior that has no other convenient designation, inflating this word’s meaning hampers our ability to communicate. Words that are abused in the way that “violence” and “gaslighting” are being abused cannot even be useful rhetorical tools for very long, since their negative associations depend upon the meanings they have prior to these manipulations. At some point, new words will need to be inflated to replace the uselessly inflated terms. Thus, semantic activists must continually comb the land in search of emotionally impactful words to be harvested, then left behind as desiccated semantic husks.
I don’t think I can do whatever I like. I don’t think I have unlimited rights to express my creativity, sexuality and so on – though I do have some rights. In truth, we cannot be creative in a world without limits. We need forms. For example, every work of art is fleshed around a kind of moral skeleton, from which it has no liberty to stray without loss of meaning. Once upon a time, I came of age into a time of obligation and mutuality. I must be conservative. I also came of age into a world of natural delights, which were not of my making, but which I am bound to protect, celebrate and pass on for the delight of others. Those delights are not mine, but I can contribute my perception of them. I cannot “improve” them, but can easily do them harm. The protection of delights of the common is a learnt behaviour, which we first inherit and then bequeath as our children eventually come of age. Culture is what we do, not what we are or have. Commons are the inherited dynamo for methods to maintain a culture. Commoning may be dextrous, ingenious and inspired with new perceptions, but it must always be conservative.
Enclosure is a device to escape the obligations of the common and so gain personal liberty to misbehave. Today’s so called conservative political parties have all been founded to protect the lawful amorality of libertines. Every enclosure is the same – land property, status property, intellectual property, monetary property – and their rents…
Let’s think of commons and rationing – commons and the duration of space or conversely – the substantial punctuations of time…
Here are some thoughts – The language of the common is rhythmic.
The language of enclosure has no sense of time.
All is urgency on the common today – climate change, cascading species-loss and the invasion of dis-functional cult economics. Behind the enclosures we can gently sleep. In truth, the mass of population reclines behind the wire. Many though, anxiously pace labyrinths of debt and rent – in waking nightmares. Some are entangled in the wires, while commons call, like birds singing from inaccessible woods.
Because most political, social and working life is enclosed, people falsely conclude that our struggle must be to improve those enclosures – not to step gently into the wood. That choice, to weave improvements into the wires, is the course taken by most of the liberal left. It endorses enclosure.
Today’s conservatives would consider this writing to be “radical left” and yet, though I’ve little choice but to identify with the left, I consider myself at heart, conservative.
That is, because I would be conservative from the common – the common of the duration of things and of allotments – allotments of both space and time. I have rations of space and time. The heart of my economy is both the celebration of what I have and also its absolute rationing – fair shares.
Farming practice is a useful model for every practice – the practice of rationing – the law of use and return, so that what we do is fitting. How do we fit? Within a restlessly paced boundary? – No. I say, by the practice of fitting and conservative behaviour.
Green writers use the terms limits and boundaries, but seldom rationing – the allotment of rations and also the rationing of allotments! But a ration is a palpable substance that is also shaped by duration. My ration can be loved, hallowed, tasted, shared. I can rest in it and I can call it abundance for just a while. It does not ask me to pace boundaries, or to pause at an extent. I live at its heart. I am a part of both its nerves and its metabolism. I can enjoy my responsibility for it, knowing that my eaten cake will vanish, just as Summer comes and vanishes – everything, including the sequence of my heartbeats will vanish. We carefully share rations of such precious things. If we fit our ration – let’s say of soil, water… and follow the rule of return, then we can fit an undiminished landscape of soil and water that yet bears our traces. (see Ivan Illich, below)
Commons define fitting behaviour and that behaviour must always be conservative. Consider this – a synonym for fitting might be happy – or felicitous…
Also consider – modern conservatives, such as those in the currently extreme right-wing UK Conservative Party, would conserve their status quo of monopolies; of status – they’d extend the rigid shape of an existing fence-line into changing times, while this writer from the apparently radical left would conserve the far more ancient moral directions of the common, which also mutate as the times mutate.
Note that this conflict is an ancient one. It indicates why empires will always fall.
Modern conservatives conserve no less than the stillness of property (land, status, seed…) at their imagined and preserved end of history. But history unwinds invisibly… – visible only to the unenclosed common intelligence human beings.
Here is a favourite passage of mine from Ivan Illich, (Declaration on Soil 1990) –
We note that (such) virtue is traditionally found in labour, craft, dwelling and suffering supported, not by an abstract earth or energy system, but by the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces.
Yet in spite of this ultimate bond between soil and being, soil and the good, philosophy has not brought forth the concepts that would allow us to relate virtue to common soil, something vastly different from managing behaviour on a shared planet.
In case that readers think that mere philosophy is a snowflake falling to the fire of today’s awesome problems, I note that the study of economics – the management of households and their supporting businesses – is a branch, I think the central branch – the trunk, of moral philosophy.
I’d go as far to say that commons are inherited and also bequeathed moral philosophies – the time-honed, ancestral guidance of community.
Eric Linberg beautifully discusses the same in a deeply thoughtful article on the conservatism of Wendell Berry. (Look and See; Listen and hear: Wendell Berry and the Contradictions of our Climate, Resilience.org)
He speaks of Wendell Berry’s “unembarrassed appeal to morality and its requirements. More specifically, the moral order of a unified society, Berry says,
“requires the addition of a third term: production, consumption, and return. It is the principle of return,” he continues, setting up perhaps the most beautiful lines in The Unsettling of America, “that complicates matters, for it requires responsibility, care, of a different and higher order than that required by production and consumption alone.”
And in a following passage:
“Thus, the great internal conflict within Liberal Environmentalism, not to mention left-leaning politics in an age of limits. Our natural environment requires this “care and responsibility of a higher order,” yet Liberal choice forbids any such requirements. We desperately need limits and constraints; yet our Liberalism requires that they be freely chosen and that they reflect our personal style. One of my main purposes, here and elsewhere, is to reflect on the way a reconciliation to this contradiction is or might be imagined. An originary Liberal attempt, lost long ago in the trenches of the Somme and scattered by the fragments of modernist culture, was the dream that Enlightened knowledge would guide us to freely choose a higher order. More recently, the systematic depersonalization of power, order, and authority represented by the market economy has been a facile proxy. Communitarians, in contrast, have hoped that finding a true natural order would provide a “reunion to that which one belongs and from which one is estranged.”
The rule of return is the central principle of all farming methods. It is a part of both that belonging and the defeat of estrangement. It is also the central moral of the commons. One whose guidance is the rule of return may be called a conservative – conserving by methods which focus on, as Ivan Ilich says, not an abstract earth or energy system, but the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces.
Of course, we may be imprisoned or worse for living beyond the wires, but we negotiate the conflict as best we can. From the common we must negotiate with the enclosures.
Dougald Hine explains the danger in that negotiation. (The Three Languages You Need to Bring a Project to Life, dougald.nu):
“The Upward language is the language of power and resources: the language of funding applications, the language of those who are in a position to interpret regulations and impose or remove obstacles. It is not a reflective or a curious language, it is a language of busy people who make decisions without having time to immerse themselves in the realities their decisions will affect. It is an impoverished language and when you have to describe what you are doing in its terms, you will feel that something is missing. You need a guide who is initiated into the relevant version of this language, who knows which words currently act as keys to which doors, what you have to say to have a decent chance of the gatekeepers letting you through. Yet even inside these institutions, you are dealing with human beings, so if you can allow glimpses of what matters about your project to show through the filter of keywords, it may just make a difference.”
He points out the dangers:
“For example, you might recognise the kind of project which has an Upward language but no Inward language, which appears to have been constructed entirely for the purposes of accessing funding and resources, with no underlying life to it. Whole organisations seem to exist to create such projects, serving little other purpose.”
Many green writers, though usually with the best intent and I’d say, nearly all NGOs have lost their way with that upward – what we might call “grown-up” language. Such language is usually studded with acronyms and code words which demonstrate the speaker’s battle-hardened prowess in a “real” grown-up world. Such adversarial language is rather like the trespassers will be prosecuted signs at the fence-line of enclosure. It has not the diversity to celebrate what’s within the fence – to make it worth the defending – it is a tool to keep invaders out. At the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood in which Pooh and Piglet hunt for the Woozle, a sign so faded that only the letters, Trespassers W remain, leads Piglet to fancifully expound how Trespassers W was an ancestor of his. As David Bollier (and also Lee Hoinacki) points out, the common is a realm, more of verbs, than nouns. I’d go further – it is a spiritual world – the same spirit which was inhabited by our ancestors and must remain for habitation by our descendants. The wood (or guiding spirit) is populated by goings-on; by verbs; by responses, whereas the woodland property is made up of nouns – unresponsive things. In the language of commons, we can speak of time – of the duration of things and of a variety of clocks of differing speeds, such as receding, or returning felicity, decay, regeneration, life-span, ancestry, heartbeats, hopes, tides, diurnity, seasons, or the elasticity of times between hope, excitement or disappointment during a Woozle hunt in a hundred-acre wood…
If grown-up language has not the capacity to express the whole of truth, then we should use it with the greatest care – though it may be a tool for defending those lawful (and lore-full) properties of a common – that is, their right to exist – to be acknowledged in the eyes of others. It may express simply – this common exists.
When Theresa May leans forward, wagging her finger, to say, “there is no magic money tree”, she is using the ancient ploy of those who live by such trees to keep commoners in their place and without them.
Theresa lives by magically debt-created money; by quantitively easing magic money into the money flow – most of which ends in increased property prices and increased rent – accumulating the wealth of those reclining beneath the money trees, while further impoverishing those, who by Trespassers W, have been expelled from the wood.
But the phrase is effective, because there are no magic money trees on the common, or in an ordinary household. She appeals to both an ancient moral and a law of physics to maintain the depravity of the amoral and dis-physical casino which sustains her circle of friends and her government. Householders know that money does not grow on trees and so return home reflecting that our Theresa has a wise head on her Tory shoulders. Many, who would otherwise consider that social justice and climate change were a part of balancing budgets, instead, recoil from the idiocy of magic money trees (the social spending of the Left) and vote for Theresa in the following ballot. Citizen-contributions to pay for that social spending are similarly demonised by the wagging finger as importunate attacks on hard-working households.
I suppose the lesson of this little essay is to beware of grown-ups – the grown-up in ourselves as much as in others. Our true coming of age is into the spirit of the common; into the responsibilities of the rule of return and the maintenance of the joys of precious things. That is – to become conservative and to stand against the violent conservation of suicidal, time-dead, greed-laden fence-lines, which has become the purpose (in UK) of Tory, Liberal and New Labour political parties. The world over, it seems that similar stories unfold…
Mr Hale had discovered his talent for language when playing with Indian friends who taught him Hopi and Navajo. Learning languages became an obsession. Wherever he travelled he picked up a new tongue. In Spain he learnt Basque; in Ireland he spoke Gaelic so convincingly that an immigration officer asked if he knew English. He apologised to the Dutch for taking a whole week to master their somewhat complex language. He picked up the rudiments of Japanese after watching a Japanese film with subtitles. He sought to rescue languages that were dying out. One Indian language at its last gasp was spoken by the Wopanaak, the tribe that greeted the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. It is now spoken again by several thousand people around Cape Cod. A Wopanaak who studied under Mr Hale is preparing a dictionary of her language. “Ken was a voice for the voiceless,” said Noam Chomsky.
Mr Hale could converse in about 50 languages, perhaps a world record, although he was too modest to claim one. But some tongues, such as Australia's Lardil, died with its last seven speakers. Mr Hale was the last person on earth to speak some languages. Hundreds are disappearing, he said. “They became extinct, and I had no one to speak them with.”