[LINK] "This Little Red Book Confronts Sexism in the Chinese Language"
Wired's Liz Stinson notes a new Chinese-language dictionary that engages with structural sexism in written Chinese.
Activism can take many forms. In the case of Women’s Words, it takes the form of a little red dictionary. The tiny book is the work of Karmen Hui, Tan Sueh Li, and Tan Zi Hao of Malaysian design collective TypoKaki. On its pages you’ll find made-up words and phrases-Chinese characters that, through their unusual arrangement and alteration, subvert the sexism ingrained in Mandarin.
Unlike the phoneticism of English, written Mandarin relies on pictorial representations of words. These characters are made up of graphic symbols called radicals, which often are combined with phonetic or semantic components to form compound characters. Women’s Words centers on the female radical pronounced “nu” (女)-a symbol which has been a source of contention among feminists because of its visual etymology (the original female radical depicted a woman bowing before a man).
Tan Zi Hao explains that by adding, removing, or changing the position of the female radical (女) in these compound characters, he and his fellow designers devised a new vernacular of 30 feminist-leaning words and phrases. Many of the words in the dictionary are like pictorial portmanteaus, blending two separate words to make a single word with a new meaning. Take one entry, which combines the female radical with “mao” (毛), the character for the word “hair.” The designers added an extra stroke to 毛, and inserted a female radical on the left. “It indicates that a woman can be hairy, which is a word that doesn’t exist in the Chinese vocabulary,” Tan says.
Activism can take many forms. In the case of Women’s Words, it takes the form of a little red dictionary. The tiny book is the work of Karmen Hui, Tan Sueh Li, and Tan Zi Hao of Malaysian design collective TypoKaki. On its pages you’ll find made-up words and phrases-Chinese characters that, through their unusual arrangement and alteration, subvert the sexism ingrained in Mandarin.
Unlike the phoneticism of English, written Mandarin relies on pictorial representations of words. These characters are made up of graphic symbols called radicals, which often are combined with phonetic or semantic components to form compound characters. Women’s Words centers on the female radical pronounced “nu” (女)-a symbol which has been a source of contention among feminists because of its visual etymology (the original female radical depicted a woman bowing before a man).
Tan Zi Hao explains that by adding, removing, or changing the position of the female radical (女) in these compound characters, he and his fellow designers devised a new vernacular of 30 feminist-leaning words and phrases. Many of the words in the dictionary are like pictorial portmanteaus, blending two separate words to make a single word with a new meaning. Take one entry, which combines the female radical with “mao” (毛), the character for the word “hair.” The designers added an extra stroke to 毛, and inserted a female radical on the left. “It indicates that a woman can be hairy, which is a word that doesn’t exist in the Chinese vocabulary,” Tan says.