Kao Benhan had a good method for conducting fieldwork, which was to make word cards with 3,200 words, and find someone to read them to him wherever he went. Then he used a phonetic notation system he designed to Mark it out, and finally get a huge "sample library" of dozens of dialects.
This is a real effort. If Gao Benhan didn’t love Chinese to the core, he would tell people in Shandong dialect “I am originally Han” when meeting people. When he arrived in Europe, he would not forget to promote “Chinese characters are a A beautiful and lovely lady, Western writing is like a useful but beautiful maid." It would be difficult for a Chinese person to do this.
Hu Shih once commented on the European Sinologists of the early 20th century: "Except for Pelliot and Copenhagen, everyone else is a foreign liar." This is not unreasonable.
Zhou Zhi also felt that this method could be used, but as a Chinese, he saw more scientific methods than Copenhagen.
Let’s use Cantonese as an example. Cantonese itself is divided into “Yayan” and “Vernacular”. The former is used in official documents for reciting poems, composing operas, and dramas. A typical example is the familiar Cantonese song;
Vernacular is what Cantonese people say in daily life. This kind of speech contains a lot of slang and modal particles. Many special pronunciation combinations are often hidden in such slang and modal particles, which are not used at all in formal situations. arrive.
If these word cards are given to dialect speakers to read, they will most likely use "Yayan" to express them, which means that people will be a little "pretentious" in that situation, so that This will result in loss of sampling.
So when Zhou Zhi raised this issue, Gu Youwen not only did not think Zhou Zhi’s idea was random, but said: "There is a senior in phonetics who has thought of this issue a long time ago. You can also be said to be a hero. We see the same thing.”
"Who is it?" Zhou Zhi couldn't help but feel happy: "Then has this senior solved this problem?"
"Solved it, but it took a long time." Gu Youwen smiled and said: "This person's The name is a bit weird, Zheng Zhang Shangfang, have you heard of it?”
"He! I've heard of him, I've heard of him, he's doing ancient pronunciation!"
"Eh? Do you really know him?" Now it was Gu Youwen's turn to be surprised.
"A prodigy in phonology, self-taught without a teacher, a role model for our generation." Zhou Zhi said, he would not tell Gu Youwen in later generations on the Internet, because some people use the so-called "ancient sounds" of Jiqu Naiya to interpret " "Guan Ju" caused an uproar.
The "ancient sound" circulated on the Internet is said to be the "Zheng-Zhang language family" used.
But when Zhou Zhi heard it, he knew that the pronunciation was the accent of a northerner. He didn’t even master the entry tone. He only had four tones, and he didn’t even reach the nine tones and six tones of Cantonese. In addition, the pronunciation was full of There are many tongue-licking sounds that are completely inconsistent with the Chinese tradition, and the overly obvious larynx The stop sound is not a big problem with the ancient phonetic system constructed by Zheng Zhang, but the reading method on the Internet still makes the mistake of northerners who don't listen to Cantonese, but just want to read Cantonese according to the pinyin notation with a Cantonese dictionary. This mistake makes the reading of "Guan Ju" very funny.
The Book of Songs was collected by Confucius, and Confucius emphasized the need to use "elegant words" in formal occasions. "What is elegant words"? It was the language used by the people around the capital of the Zhou Dynasty. Confucius thought it was very pleasant, so he called it "elegant language".
Even people who don’t know anything about a language can still tell whether it’s good or bad from the recitation. It’s like letting a person who doesn’t understand English listen to a drama actor reciting Shakespeare’s opera, even though he can’t hear it. I understand, but I still think it sounds very nice, that’s the reason. If the reading of "Guan Ju" does not sound good at all, then there is only one explanation - the reader must have read it wrong.
It’s hard to rhyme, you can’t even rhyme, you’re telling me that this is an ancient “elegant language” based on “Zheng Zhang’s construction”?
It is wrong from the most basic logic.
Therefore, this is the fault of the latecomers, but not Zheng Zhang Shangfang's fault.
“I always thought his name was Zheng Zhang. Later, after reading his works, I found out that his name was Zheng Zhang Shangfang, and then I thought he was a woman who took her husband’s surname.”
"Hahahaha..." Gu Youwen said with a smile: "He brought this on himself, and he has no one to blame. When foreigners apply his papers, they often use "she" and "her" to address them, hahahaha..."
Then Gu Youwen began to tell Zhou Zhi the story of Zheng Zhang Shangfang, and only then did Zhou Zhi realize that he, the time traveler, was pretending to be a "genius" "In front of a true genius, he was really beaten to pieces in seconds.
Zheng Zhang Shangfang’s original name is Zheng Xiangfang. When he was studying in middle school, he met five people with the same name. Some wrote letters and forgot to distinguish between high school and junior high school. They often opened each other's letters. So, he changed his name to Zheng Zhang Xiangfang after his parents' surnames to show equal respect for his parents. At that time, he had a pen name of "Shang Fang", which later became "Zheng Zhang Shangfang".
In the 1920s and 1930s, Zheng Zhang Shangfang's father was a craftsman at the Wenzhou Oujiang Cloth Factory. Because he participated in a labor unrest, he was wanted by the Kuomintang authorities and was forced to leave his hometown alone.
So Zheng Zhang Shangfang has been fostered in his maternal grandfather's home in Shipu Village, Yongzhong Street since he was a child. At that time, his maternal grandfather had a miscellaneous calligraphy book left over from the Qing Dynasty, which classified the words used in Wenzhou dialect for daily life. The young Zheng Zhang Shangfang learned the written expressions of Wenzhou dialect for the first time, and thus developed a great interest in the dialect. interest.
In junior high school, the Chinese teacher encouraged his students to collect proverbs to enrich their vocabulary, so he took the lead in organizing a proverb interest group. Many Wenzhou dialects are difficult to record in Chinese characters. In addition to looking up the dictionary, he tried to use pinyin to record the dialects that could not be recorded in Chinese characters. This was the first step to explore and overcome the problem of recording dialects, and he became obsessed with how to pinyin the dialects.
Later, he found "Research on Modern Wu Dialect" written by Zhao Yuanren in the Wenzhou Library. The book recorded a complete set of methods for recording Wenzhou dialect using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which enabled him to truly explore the scientific path to study language. .
New China was founded after graduating from junior high school. Three years after graduating from high school, Zheng Zhang Shangfang successively served as a geophysical prospecting team member of the Department of Geology, a teacher at Wuma Middle School in WZ City, a cataloger at the city library, and in special years also I have been a fishery machinery factory worker for more than ten years.
In order to study Wenzhou dialect, Zheng Zhang Shangfang often listened to other people's quarrels on the streets of Wenzhou and recorded the spoken words of the quarrels into cards on the spot. He said that this is one of the ways to study language. Hard work paid off. By 1966, he had accumulated more than 30,000 slang and dialect cards, and at the same time collected 64 books and materials about Wenzhou dialect. Although half of the books were confiscated during the turmoil, they had laid a solid and extensive foundation for fieldwork for him.
I have always been keen on self-study of linguistics. In the ten years since 1955, more than ten articles on pinyin and dialects were published. (End of this chapter)