Chapter 1813 Gao Benhan
“We must also combine foreign research results on language pronunciation.” Gu Youwen seemed not to have heard Zhou Zhi say that some people would criticize this, and continued to ponder: “Have you studied Gao Benhan’s stuff? "
"I can't talk about research, but I have read his book "Gao Benhan's Theory of Harmony", Zhou Zhi replied.
“Some of his things still need to be studied carefully, especially the materials left behind by his field trips. They are the most complete dialect samples collected before the promotion of Mandarin. They are of extremely high value for us to study ancient pronunciation. . ”
Gao Benhan’s achievements in Chinese character phonology are very high and he is a legend. The funniest thing is that he is a foreigner and a Swede.
After completing his university studies, Gao Benhan went to Russia to learn basic Chinese for two months, and then got a scholarship to stay in China for two years. When the scholarship was used up, he made a living by teaching French and English at Shanxi University. .
While in China, Gao Benhan first spent several months to quickly master spoken Chinese and commonly used Chinese characters to the extent that he could go out independently. Afterwards, he made a detailed survey question list and began to collect dialect information. collection and verification.
He worked hard to collect records and surveys of twenty-four dialects in China, including eight from Yan and Jin, six from Gansu and Shaanxi, three from Henan Province, and the Jinling dialect. The above nineteen varieties belong to the northern Mandarin system.
In addition, Shanghai dialect without dialect, Fuzhou dialect representing Min dialect, and Cantonese representing Cantonese dialect are also collected.
We even collected Japanese and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese borrowed words. In addition, he also collected the pronunciations of nine other dialects based on published materials.
With these fieldwork results, he began to think about the phonological system of ancient Chinese.
In the end, Gao Benhan became a world-famous sinologist. His academic research mainly involved the fields of Chinese linguistics and archeology. He wrote as many as one hundred books in his life. His research scope included Chinese phonology, dialectology, lexicography, and literature. science, archaeology, literature, art and religion.
The most significant contribution of Gao Benhan’s academic research is the completion of the construction of the ancient Chinese phonetic system.
This construction is reflected in two works, "Research on Chinese Phonology" and "Dictionary of Ancient Chinese".
Before Gao Benhan, the Chinese linguistics community could only use the fanqie method to verify ancient phonetics based on rhyme diagrams. Gao Benhan invented a set of methods to describe ancient sounds using phonetic alphabets, to check each other with the rhymes of the Fanqie system, and to compare modern Chinese with borrowed sounds translated from ancient Chinese in languages such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam and other countries. In terms of study, he took "Qie Yun" as the It focuses on the ancient sounds of the Pre-Qin Dynasty and the dialects of modern Chinese at the bottom. It conducts a comprehensive study of the history of Chinese phonetics, describes the phonetics of the medieval Chinese phonology and the ancient phonology, and constructs specific phonetic concepts for each phonetic category. The phonetic value was written as "Research on Chinese Phonology".
This book has great influence and marks the beginning of the history of modern Chinese phonology. "Where did you read "Research on Chinese Phonology"?" The old man was very pleased to see that the disciple who had been closed down did not give up on his knowledge even though he was so busy: "Have you encountered any problems?"
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"Research on Chinese Phonology" is divided into four volumes, in addition to the "original preface", "introduction" and appendix "map of investigated dialects": Volume 1 Ancient Chinese; Volume 2 Descriptive Phonetics of Modern Dialects; Volume 3 Volume 1: Historical Research; Volume 4: Dialect Vocabulary. In fact, he talked about an introduction to the history of Chinese phonetics, description methods in modern dialect research and synchronic description in historical linguistics research, historical interpretation methods in historical linguistics, dialect dictionary compilation and compilation methods.
This is to question the reading experience. Zhou Zhi said: "Based on the ancient phonetic structure of "Guangyun", we will carry out research on Chinese historical phonetics. We will first make full use of modern dialect materials to prove the medieval phonetics, and then proceed from there. The way in which the medieval phonology is used to deduce the ancient phonology is very amazing.” The rhyme table, on the one hand, arranges 3,100 Chinese characters into a table based on Fanqie in "Guangyun", and then compares the pronunciation of these characters in various modern dialects, constructs their phonetic values, and combines these known characters. The phonetic values are inserted into the table, and using this scientific result from field surveys to determine the ancient phonetic categories and the ancient pronunciation of each character is far more accurate and credible than the way that traditional Chinese scholars work behind closed doors in their studies."
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"This opened up a new research avenue for the study of Chinese phonology and phonetic history. Since then, Chinese scholars have basically accepted Gao Benhan's general principles, but only revised the details."
"So Luo Changpei Only a gentleman would say that this book is not only a comprehensive work among foreigners' research on Chinese phonology, it is also comparable to the works written by domestic scholars. Taken together, the General Theory of Phonology can be regarded as an unprecedented great work. "Zhou Zhi said: "From the perspective of comparative linguistics, the value of Gao's construction is quite high."
"The reason why. The biggest reason for its high value is the scientific method and sufficient materials. When reconstructing medieval Chinese, Gao Benhan mainly used three aspects of materials: first, rhyme script and The second is Chinese dialects; the third is foreign language loanwords. The closest onomatopoeia is picked up from three aspects, and several modern scientific methods are introduced into traditional phonology, reflecting the sound and rhythm of medieval sounds in front of the big mirror of modern dialect investigation. The sound value of this system has been constructed for the first time through inference. The foundation for establishing this system is so solid that it is of great scientific value. ”
"If we want to talk about shortcomings..." Zhou Zhi said: "That is that the collection of basic samples is not comprehensive enough. For example, he did not collect the dialects of our Shuzhong, and the unique dialects of Hubei Province were not included."< br>
“The dialect of Hubei Province?” Gu Youwen frowned: “There are many medieval sounds in the southern Sichuan dialect. What are those in Hubei Province?”
"On my last trip to the Three Gorges, I found that there is a kind of tongue-licking sound in their accent. This kind of pronunciation has not been found in the Chinese language family I have been exposed to before. I wonder if they are also a survival of the medieval sound. ."
"That's it." Gu Youwen smiled and said: "Yes, this is also a small discovery."
"Another point is that when Gao Benhan was conducting research, he did not use sound recording equipment, so he was recording more than 20 dialects. At that time, the phonetic symbol table was still used, although Later, Yuan Ren was inspired by it and created China's first Roman Pinyin alphabet scheme. However, in the end, it was still using symbols to record the sounds and interpreting the sounds with the eyes, which was not accurate enough. "
"There are people around me who will say it at any time. In Mandarin, promote these sounds The pronunciation of Mandarin is easy, and it is easy to learn. But for dialects, there is not always someone around to teach you, and you may end up using Mandarin phonetic symbols to interpret the Cantonese dictionary, and it ends up being a joke.”
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