A Hmong Messianic Script… and Linguistics and that Whole Religion Deal.
December 21st, 2006Long title, huh?
Long post.
I finally got around to ordering Mother of Writing : The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script from Amazon.
Anyway, I’ve only just begun to dig in, but the book is about a rather mysterious writing system which was invented for the Hmong language, spoken primarily in Laos, but also in France, Canada, Australia, China, Thailand, French Guyana and the United States.
This isn’t to be confused with the various roman-script systems for writing the language, which are rather interesting and worth a post in their own right– no, the book is about a totally distinct script called Pahawh Hmong. You can see images of it at Omniglot under Pahawh Hmong alphabet.
The alphabet is believed by some Hmong to have been the divinely inspired creation of Shong Lue Yang (Soob Lwj Yaj).
(And by the way, eek the Wikipedia article on the Hmong language is abysmal…)
The book was written by a Christian missionary. I found it pretty interesting trying to peel back the layers of who was trying to interpret whom (and what). Yang himself was a (not exactly Christian) missionary, and part of the book was written by one of his followers. But the part which is strictly linguistic can be read without regard to any of that stuff, and the Pahawh Hmong is certainly a fine and interesting piece of orthographic engineering.
The topic of the intersection of religion and linguistics is something which kind of gets my blood boiling. Linguistics is a science, and it should be treated as such. But because missionary “work” overlaps so much with linguistic research, we end up with that the new language codes have a religious organization as their authority… And I mean the authority. As in, the ISO calls these guys up and asks for “the answer” on linguistic nomenclature.
Now, think about that for a second. What if the ISO called up the “Intelligent Design” guys for authoritative answers on biological classification? Maybe they should call up a proper psychic to resolve disputes on whether global warming is real.
I kid, slightly.
So why is the linguistics world okay with being reduced to being the authority on “Ancient, historical, and constructed languages,” while SIL is the authority for… most of the languages on the planet, and most of the languages for which you really need unyielding impartiality?
i especially know about this because when i was a six grader, my parent take me to learn my own culture and stuff. After one year of learning, i think i became smart. This mother of writing is very interesting when i start to know. It’s very hard to learn, but once you got it, it’s very simple. It tooks me two years to memorize the character. I just love this mother of writing because many things that had influence me.
- ka ying @ 17 April 2007Hi there,
Thanks for the comment. It does look quite challenging to learn. I have been studying the Ethiopic writing system for about that amount of time, and it’s only now starting to sink in.
I hope this writing system is encoded into Unicode soon.
The Gallery of Unicode Fonts says that ”
There is a proposal to add Pahawh Hmong to Unicode in the pipeline but it seems to be stalled.
However Jason Glavy has mapped 3 Hmong fonts to Unicode Private Use Area codepoints.”
Here’s hoping, anyway.
Nice to meet you!
(Btw, are there any blogs in Hmong out there that you know of?)
- pat @ 17 April 2007Hi Bryce,
Thanks for your thoughts. I’m not attacking SIL for having religious origins, or for doing linguistics; they’ve done some very fine work, and for many languages, the ONLY descriptive work. And I’m not impugning their scientific rigor in that regard (sorry if I gave that impression, the post was pretty tongue-in-cheek).
However, I do think that it is a monumentally bad idea to simply define SIL as the new international authority on linguistic nomenclature, and yes, the problem that I have with that is that they are not a secular organization. It has nothing to do with the particular religion in question; I would feel the same way if the group in questoin were Muslims or Pastafarians or whatever.
The point is not about the quality of the work. The point is that if this organization wanted to donate their considerable work to the public good, I think they should have done so by turning it over, officially, to the ISO.
Perhaps it won’t be a problem, I really don’t know. I still think it’s the wrong move.
- pat @ 20 May 2007