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Comment by baobrain | Hacker News Reader

Someone posted this in the comments:

> 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

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Indeed, Sampson's retraction is published here: https://www.grsampson.net/ACsa.html

> 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.

Good find. I did some more research on John DeFrancis and found his writings on the topic. Pg 32 discusses the "love letter" being part of a semi-ritualized party game. [1]

[1] Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems: https://books.google.com/books?id=hypplIDMd0IC&pg=PA24&dq=is...

John DeFrancis was an amazing thoughtful and insightful linguist and was, as you can see from this example, very happy to look into what he considered bizarre claims (which he sometimes discovered were true). I'm a huge fan of his work.

Very impressive indeed; I only clicked the 'Visible Speech' link thanks to reading your comment; the diagram illustrating the lineage / spread of the the 'Yukaghir Love Letter' is worth the click alone.

Dang it! See my comment below. :-)

Indeed, it's a very nice story, but appears to be fake. I won't duplicate what other commenters have added in this thread, but one other approach to investigating is to see whether any other images of Yukaghir semasiographic letters can be found online.

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=...

Thanks so much for pointing this out. I thought the letter's interpretation was beautiful, and I'm tremendously disappointed now, but I'm glad that I know.

So this whole article was, roughly speaking, like attempting to interpret the meaning of a scrap of paper used in a game of Pictionary, given only that piece of paper?

More details: https://books.google.com/books?id=fRqKreZFVTYC&pg=PA22&lpg=P...

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