Pau Cin Hau Logograms — 1902 AD, Mayanmar

Posted on May 10, 2011 by ducky

Pau Cin Hai unknown logogram

In 1902 AD, a man named Pau Cin Hau had a dream where the characters of a logographic script were revealed to him.  He also developed the Laipian religion, and his script was used extensively in liturgical works.  Laipian actually means “script-based”, so the script was intimately connected to the religion.

The script had around one thousand characters, which is a small number for a logographic language.

Also unusually for a logographic language, the glyphs are very abstract, with no recognizable connection to tangible physical objects.

There is a story that the Chin people had a script in ancient times, but that there was only one copy of it, written on an animal hide.  The guardian of the script went travelling with his dog, who got hungry and ate the script!

In the 1950s, there was a rapid Christianization of the Chin people, which lead to a drop in the number of people who learned the Laipian scripts.

Links: Unicode proposal

About ducky

I'm a computer programmer professionally, currently working on mapping applications. I have been interested non-professionally for a long time in the effect on society on advances in communications technology -- things like writing, vowels, spaces between words, paper, etc.
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7 Responses to Pau Cin Hau Logograms — 1902 AD, Mayanmar

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