In the end, Zhou Zhi's research direction was established, which was to bring together the theories of Gao Benhan and Zheng Zhang Shangfang, use recording technology that is more direct to language to conduct sampling, and upgrade Gao Benhan's field survey model. In addition to local dialects, "Elegant pronunciation" must be collected, "slang" must be collected, and the types of dialects must be expanded, striving to cover all places in the country where Chinese is spoken.
This is the first step. After this step is completed, the "reading" of Chinese in various parts of China will be basically sorted out.
After completing this step, the second step is to include Japanese, Chinese, South Vietnamese, and Indian languages.
There are a large number of ancient pronunciations of Chinese characters preserved in the first three languages. Although there will definitely be huge changes, they can be used as an important reference for domestic dialects.
The last language has another advantage. When China translated Buddhist scriptures, it used a lot of "transliteration", such as "Prajnaparamita", which created a bridge between sound and text. .
Later generations can deduce the ancient Chinese pronunciation of the words used in "transliteration of foreign words" through the pronunciation of this word in ancient Sanskrit.
There are two simple examples of deducing the pronunciation of the original word and the region of origin based on the pronunciation of transliterated foreign words. "Lychee" and "KungFu", lychee and Kung Fu, are obviously all based on the Cantonese pronunciation. "Chinese loanwords" in English.
Including "Canton", so is the word Guangdong.
After completing these two steps, the "Inferred Specimen Library" has been truly established. After that, the anti-cut method in "Qie Yun" and "Guang Yun" will be used as logical evidence to verify the specimen library. Pronunciation that matches it.
In addition, a large number of poems, songs, parallel prose and other rhythmic classics must be used to verify the "universality" of this reading method, and finally deduce the medieval pronunciation of Chinese.
Of course, it is impossible to deduce the pronunciation of all characters through this method. The limitation of this method is that it can only deduce the pronunciations of ancient Chinese in various dialects in China and surrounding countries. Through these preservation, we can find out the rhyme part of the text in "Qie Yun" and "Guang Yun", so that the sound and rhyme of this rhyme part can be restored.
But there is definitely still a missing part. This part was not lost due to the promotion of Mandarin in recent decades, but in the process of evolving from "Qie Yun" to "Guang Yun" , that is to say, a considerable part has been missing from the Tang Dynasty to the Song Dynasty.
Academic circles therefore call the pronunciation of Chinese characters in the Ming and Qing Dynasties the "modern" pronunciation, the pronunciation of Chinese characters in the Song Dynasty as the "medieval" pronunciation, and the pronunciation of Chinese characters in the Tang Dynasty as the "ancient pronunciation".
However, the "Hongwu Zhengyun" of the Ming Dynasty can only be used as a reference, because even the emperor was not satisfied with this thing when it came out, so he changed its name to "Hongwu Tongyun".
On the contrary, "Pingshui Yun", which is based on "Qie Yun" and "Ci Lin Zheng Yun", which is based on Ping Shui Yun, have been promoted and popularized even more.
Therefore, the task of deciphering the pronunciation of the three periods is actually the task of deciphering "Qie Yun", "Guang Yun" and "Pingshui Yun".
"Pingshui Yun" does not need to be deciphered, because the era is relatively recent, and scholars of the Ming and Qing Dynasties left a lot of information in exegetical works. Even today, classical literature lovers generally compose poems based on "Pingshui Yun". Everyone is very familiar with it. Therefore, the task of up and down still lies in the former, and the focus is still on the "addendum" part.
Here we need to introduce a large number of scientific methods for language research at home and abroad. The pronunciation of Chinese characters is inferred. "Tui" refers to the former, and "imitate" refers to the latter.
Modern times already have a sound and scientific Foley system. The focus is to solve the complex changes in initial consonants and the complex existence of finals in ancient Chinese.
For example, the voiced stops in initial consonants have changed or disappeared, and the diphthongs and compound finals in final consonants do not exist in modern Chinese.
However, these can also be found in phonetic systems around the world. For example, British English retains many uses of diphthongs and compound vowels. Combined with some relics in the Cantonese system, it becomes It can be deduced quite scientifically.
In addition to the research on initials and finals, there are also some studies on the laws of historical sound changes. For example, there were no voiced or nasal sounds in ancient China, and there were also factors such as the transmission of yin sounds from yang to yin, the merging period of yin and yang in the ancient times, and other factors. All have to be considered one by one.
Nowadays, scholars who study ancient pronunciation are divided into two groups. One group uses the pinyin system of modern Chinese and combines Western academic achievements to directly conduct onomatopoeia work; the other group uses ancient phonology rules recorded in ancient books. Foley.
What seems weird and unbelievable on the Internet in later generations is actually the rigid use of the first method, and the latter method is difficult to learn and popularize except for scholars who specialize in profound research.
Because many of these scholars are conducting purely theoretical research, they know that this character is Rusheng in "Guangyun", but they do not have a straightforward concept of how to pronounce Rusheng. This kind of "" cannot be put into practice. The flood of “purely theoretical” scholars teaching students in universities is the real reason why the course of phonetic and rhyme exegesis has become a major stumbling block for Chinese departments.
The teachers can’t pronounce the Chinese characters, so the students have to memorize them by rote. Anyway, the exams are paper papers instead of interviews. As long as they can write it out, that’s fine.
In this course, Zhou Zhi asked students to follow Monkey to understand through specimen cases in Cantonese, which gave everyone an intuitive impression and made everyone feel quite relaxed about this course. The test scores were once Gu Kailai even wondered whether widespread cheating had occurred.
Now that Zhou Zhi is here, he must combine the two methods, and finally come up with a set of standard phonetic symbols-pinyin-tonal-audio reading correspondence table. With voice assistance, for the future Learning and research, and even preserving this "civilizational heritage", will play a huge role.
"How is it?" Gu Kailai took the notebook from Zhou Zhi's hand and used a mind map to draw out the research work for the next two years. He was very satisfied, but he also showed some worries. : "Can you complete the specimen sampling work of more than 20 dialects, as well as Korean, Japanese, South Vietnamese and Sanskrit within two years?"
"Hehehehe..." Zhou Zhi said with a smile: "The research methods can be changed. There are so many college students in Chinese departments across the country, and they have basically completed the two courses of phonological exegesis and fieldwork. The so-called high reward must be Yongfu, it’s no longer the time when Gao Benhan went around looking for people to read with word cards!” (End of this chapter)