A Yukaghir girl writes a love letter
historyview.blogspot.com
historyview.blogspot.com
> Utter nonsense. John DeFrancis debunked your interpretation of this drawing back in 1989. This is not a letter at all. It was a prop in a parlor game played by Yukaghari girls: one girl would sketch a drawing and the others would take turns trying to guess the story behind it.
> Geoffrey Sampson helped to propagate this myth in his book on writing systems first published in 1985. Sampson published a retraction in 1994.
While I could not find any verification in a cursory search, maybe we should take this with a grian of salt
> DeFrancis’s argument to this effect turns on examination of an example quoted in Sampson (1985: 28‑9) of purported complex semasiography, the ‘Yukaghir love letter’. I had taken this example from a well-known book on writing, Diringer (n.d.: 35), and I retailed Diringer’s explanation of it without trying to check this. DeFrancis has done the discipline a considerable service by investigating the history of the example in detail, and it turns out to be something rather different from what Diringer and I described, and arguably not an example of ‘communication’ at all.
It seems nearly certain that this image is not what it was presented to be.
[1] Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems: https://books.google.com/books?id=hypplIDMd0IC&pg=PA24&dq=is...
Perhaps this wouldn't be foolproof (given that the Yukaghir population is very small, and their materials might not have been published and indexed widely online) but the absence of any other examples certainly seems a little suspect.
Search link: https://www.google.com/search?q=Yukaghir+semasiographic&tbm=...
"As the young people assembled for the dance, a girl might take a piece of fresh birch bark and start carving with a very sharp knife. The others gathered around and watched the progress of the carving. There was much banter, and guesses were made as to who was being depicted and what was being said. Incorrect guesses were met with derision by the carver, so that eventually all present would arrive at an understanding of the contents."
[...]
"In short, the notorious "love letter" and others like it are nothing more than the semiritualized product of these Yukaghir party games. They must not be thought of as real letters posted to someone who would read them as we do our mail. The Russian observers make clear that the compositions were primarily vehicles whereby young women could publicly express their feelings on the single theme of love and separation in a socially acceptable form before a small circle of friends..."
[...]
"The way in which the meaning of the Yukaghir "letter" was actually transmitted, first to a small circle of intimates at the time of its creation and later to a worldwide audience by a succession of scholars, most closely parallels the way in which the meaning of a highly allegorical medieval painting or of a Bayeaux tapestry originated and was transmitted over time. This analogy suggests that the Yukaghir birchbark carving should be viewed as an example not of writing but of anecdotic art whose message can be understood only to the degree one is in contact with its creator, the situation or culture that produced it, or someone who can interpret it for us."
I strongly recommend DeFrancis, both this book and his book The Chinese Language. He's an excellent writer and his take on the issues of writing in general is fascinating and well thought-out.
This information has been debunked since before the internet existed in any modern sense, so posting the information enirely without errata has no excuse. If this post had included errata that explained that the interpretation it discusses is likely incorrect, then I would not have flagged it.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/079/173/ed2...