The COVID-19 pandemic began in Wuhan, China, two years ago. When an early warning of mysterious pneumonia cases shared by doctor Li Wenliang (李文亮) (Wikipedia) with his mates was spread publicly, he was censured by the police. (He soon died of the disease in February 2020.) Ai Fen (艾芬), Li's source (ibid.) working at the same hospital, disclosed the situation in the hospital to a monthly periodical People (人物). The interview article published online on 10 March 2020 was deleted in a few hours, but people spread it in more than twenty variations to avoid the detection by the authorities. They used cryptic character sets, foreign languages, Morse code, bar code, etc. (The Asahi Shimbun, 13 March 2020; more images at asahi.com).
One of them employed emoji to hide characters here and there. Images may be found by googling with "火星字" (Martian script), which refers to writing text by replacing characters with similar sounding symbols etc. ("+U" for "加油" is an example taken from People's China: the character "加" means "add" and "油" sounds similar to "U." The scheme is similar to what was known as "hakspek" in English: "c u 2day" for "See you today", an example taken from Oxford Reference.) The cryptic look is sometimes called "emoji cipher", but may more appropriately be called a "rebus".
The example below seems to be from the interview article. I interleaved the rebus with the original text (in unsimplified Chinese characters), which shows how Chinese characters are replaced with emoji for a similar sounding word. For example, the name "艾" (ai) is replaced by the heart symbol, meaning "love" or 愛 (ai) in Chinese (and Japanese). The character "的" (of) is replaced by a symbol of drops (represented by a similar sounding character "滴" in Chinese). Characters "人" (person) and "毒" (poison) are replaced by ideographs. People versed in Chinese will find out more.
【發哨子的人】武漢醫師受訪，全網花式接力，胡錫進：要為不滿情緒留出必要出口
中國網民怒用「火星文」揭疫情真相 王丹：看了頭暈但內心鼓舞
No comments:
Post a Comment