Chapter 1812 The direction of knowledge
"It is natural to master your own knowledge." Mr. Gu nodded in agreement, but then shook his head: "But these are family studies, just take your time, don't rush It’s hard to deal with it for a while "The subject of school."
"Your uncle is also a homeschooler, but now he is working on "Jiyun" in the capital. With cooperation with several overseas libraries, he searched for it through your engine. There are five Song and Shadow Song versions of "Ji Yun". There are also more than 30 notes about the achievements of "Ji Yun" by Qing people."
"He planned to use these as a proofreading version of "Ji Yun" by Gu Guangqi of the Qing Dynasty, which was the most widely circulated. Large-scale comprehensive schooling, organized into "Ji Yun Xiaoben", and then started research. "
"Ji Yun" is also a rhyme book in the Song Dynasty. It was compiled during the reign of Renzong. The great scholar Song Qi believed that "Guang Yun" mostly used "old texts" to collect texts. Too few, so he wrote to the emperor asking for more.
This book uses exactly the same rhymes as "Guangyun", except that the words used in the rhymes, the order of some rhymes, and the regulations of common use and exclusive use noted under the rhymes are slightly different.
If "Guangyun" is more adapted to the pronunciation of the Tang Dynasty, which is the "ancient dialect" for the Song people, then "Jiyun" is like the Mandarin dictionary of the Song people, taking care of The Song Dynasty's "Jin Yan".
Therefore, "Ji Yun" is of great significance for studying the migration and transformation of the standard pronunciation of ancient languages, that is, the "rhythmic change", and for deducing the true pronunciation of characters by the ancients.
In addition, "Ji Yun" contains more than 50,000 characters commonly used in the Song Dynasty, which is double the number of words in "Guang Yun", and many heavy characters and vulgar characters are also included.
The heavy characters are the four ways of writing the word "Hui" mentioned by Kong Yiji. The common characters are the commonly used alternative characters among the people, simplified characters, and the kind used in the imperial examination that was immediately rejected by the examiner.
At that time, there was a candidate named Zhao Xu in Sichuan. He was selected into the top three by the examiner and handed over to Renzong for approval. Renzong discovered that he had written "厶" next to the word "口" in the character Wei, so he failed the exam.
Another example of casual Xian, the moon in the door is the orthographic character, and the day in the door is the vulgar character. Small businessmen and hawkers can use it randomly, but not in formal occasions such as official documents.
But what’s funny is that as time goes by, many vulgar characters have gradually become orthodox characters because of the convenience of writing.
This change was exploited by scholars in the process of promoting simplified Chinese characters after the founding of the People's Republic of China. In fact, there are no more than five original characters in the simplified Chinese version, and the rest are all from ancient times. Texts and common methods have appeared.
It is completely untenable that some people in later generations will attack the simplified characters as random fabrications. For example, "cong", "li", "wan", the simplified characters are almost exactly the same as oracle bone inscriptions, quite similar. Yu returned to the original state of writing and experienced a process from simplicity to complexity, and then from complexity to simplicity.
Therefore, those who criticize simplified Chinese characters and advocate traditional Chinese characters do not have much research on traditional Chinese characters. Instead, they are mostly people who are not well-read and follow what others say.
Therefore, "Ji Yun" is also of great significance to the study of changes in Chinese characters.
According to Gu Youwen's opinion, Zhou Zhi should follow his son's research direction, build on his own school of thought, and push the study of phonology to a higher level to meet the requirements. Zhou Zhi secretly screamed in pain, who is the teacher uncle? Ten years ago, when the state organized the compilation of the "Chinese Dictionary", he was the main force. In addition to the continuous improvement over the years, he is even more happy now that he is retired. He has left his teaching position and focused on learning. Now the state has made "Jiyun" a historical research The honorable task of important research practice and historical responsibility was entrusted to him, and he stayed in the capital almost all year round. Zhou Zhi went to the capital several times to try to see him, but he was declined politely, and he was almost hidden in the pile of old papers.
A person who is so focused to the extreme, Zhou Zhi asked himself, is not comparable to a guy like himself who is throwing hammers and sticks here and there.
With such specialization, Gu Zhenduo also set a ten-year time limit for himself. Counting from the year before last, it is estimated that the book "Ji Yun Xiaoben" will not be completed until 2013.
Seeing Zhou Zhi’s expression of embarrassment, Gu Youwen smiled and said: “He is an old-school intellectual, and his methods are not advisable. For example, if you now have the support of information technology, many basic skills that needed to be memorized by rote will be greatly reduced. It can be dispensed with. With a search engine, there is less need. A lot of time is wasted on searching for citations, so what it takes him five or ten years to do, you only need one or two years to do."
"You can't say that," Zhou Zhi said. "It's still necessary to refine the article in this way, but once it's time to give a speech, In this scenario, if someone randomly asks some related questions, you won’t have to search for them before telling them the answer, right? And if you don’t have basic knowledge, you won’t know how to retrieve it even if you put the engine in front of you. If you don’t have a basic knowledge of literature and history, People who don’t have any, use search engines to find more information. It’s a waste of time.”
“Anyway, it’s much better to have tools,” Gu Youwen said: “In the future, our discipline will be even further away from the general discipline of literature and history.”
"Why?" Zhou Zhi asked.
"Because the rhymes cannot be retrieved." Gu Youwen said: "Using words to express sounds will cause a lot of information loss, such as the four tones of Ping Shang Lu, the four tones of Sichuan, the four tones of Cantonese, and the four tones of Hakka. In fact, there are subtle differences between the four tones, and the difference with Mandarin is even more It’s a world of difference.”
“So when we go back to the Song Dynasty to read Song Ci, or even go back to the Tang Dynasty to read Tang poetry, or even go back to the Pre-Qin Dynasty to read Chu Ci and the Book of Songs, what was the pronunciation like at that time? It is difficult to judge simply from basic rhyme books. ”
< br>“We can only start from the fanqie of the rhyme book, collect all the rhyme fanqie for statistics, and combine the evolution of the rhyme books before and after, combined with the various rhymes of the same period, and the phonology-related content recorded in the notes, Deduced the sounds and sounds of Song Yun and Tang Yun."
“But these two things are ultimately meant to be heard with ears, not seen with eyes, and our skill is to study the true nature of historical sounds through the sound information recorded in words. It is extremely difficult. I know..." Zhou Zhi followed Gu Youwen's topic.
“Be proud of it. Only we in China have this method of recording sounds that began thousands of years ago. It allows us to have a glimpse of ancient sounds. It is already the best among all civilization relics in the world. Gu Youwen laughed and said, "As for whether it's accurate or not?" Speaking of changes, look at contemporary English. Even with modern phonetic symbols and ready-made sound samples as auxiliary, English has undergone such big changes after it spread to Australia and North America. The phonetic symbols are the same but the pronunciation is different. They are living Example.”
Speaking of this, Gu Youwen suddenly thought of a topic: "Eh? Can we deduce Song Yun and Tang Yun, then read them out and store them as voice information?"
"Then we might be scolded. Tragic." Zhou Zhi put his hand on his forehead and said, "When the time comes, the father-in-law will say that the father-in-law is right, in Hakka and Cantonese. Among the languages with more relics from the Tang and Song Dynasties, such as Southwest Mandarin and Huguang Mandarin, which one should we use as the basis? And in the whole process of the migration of northern languages to the south, which time point should we use as the base point of Song rhyme? A time point as the base point of Tang Yun? ”