All this lather about orthographies got me to thinking about a book I read a couple of years ago called Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script. It's the story about Shong Lue Yang who claimed to be of divine origin and who invented the first true alphabetic script for Hmong. The book was written in part by William Smalley, a missionary, who in the '50s had also collaborated on developing the RPA (romanized popular alphabet). The RPA is one of a couple of other writing systems besides the messianic script (Phahawh Hmong) and RPA: Pollard script and Chinese romanized Hmong. This memory lead (via Google) to an article in the Hmong Studies Journal, "Literacy and L'Armée Clandestine: The Writings of the Hmong Military Scribes" by John Duffy. This story has got everthing: the CIA, the illegal US intervention in Laos, Christian missionaries, illiterate peasants who devise writing systems, etc. I ran across the book when I researching Iu Mien the language spoken by a high school student who I was tutoring in Latin.
[Addendum 10/09/03: I found a page with more Hmong information and that includes the Pahawh font at the University of Melbourne linguistics department.]
Posted by jim at October 7, 2003 06:32 PM | TrackBack