The road to technology

Chapter 817
"Louise, Louise!" Gary Donnelly reminded softly.

Dr. Banks finally came to her senses. She really didn't notice the angle Shang Shaojian said before, so she was fascinated by it for a while.

"I think there may be something in common, but they shouldn't be the same." Dr. Banks, who came back to his senses, said, but since she doesn't have a deep research on the heptapod writing, she is not sure. up.

As a linguist, she has studied Chinese, and she has also learned that ancient classical Chinese is like Qiwen, without punctuation marks at all. From this point of view, there are indeed similarities.

Thinking of this, she looked at Shang Shaojian and asked, "Then, why did your Chinese develop two writing systems?"

Perhaps it was because Shang Shaojian's first sentence made her fall into deep thought, but now Banks is much more serious, and there is less contempt on her face.

"I think it's because there was no paper in ancient times, and the ancients wanted to save space. For example, there is a saying in "The Analects": "Don't mean, don't necessarily, don't stick to me." As a linguist, the doctor is also proficient in Chinese, so he must know how to use this sentence. What will modern Chinese writing be like?" Shang Shaojian expressed his opinion with a smile, it seems that he still has some culture.

However, he said this sentence in "The Analects of Confucius" in Chinese, so that no one except Dr. Banks could understand what he said.

So much so that Gary Donnelly and Colonel Weber looked at her in confusion.

Dr. Banks is also very knowledgeable. Seeing her pondering for a while, she replied: "In colloquial Chinese, it should be like this: Tell the facts, don't make guesses; don't be arbitrary or willful when things happen, do what you can; act flexibly, don't die. Board; don’t take “I” as the center in everything, don’t be self-righteous, and work together with the people around you to complete the task.”

Dr. Banks said it in Chinese, and then repeated it in English to the confused two people.

Shang Shaojian smiled kindly: "Look, the bamboo slips are not light. Imagine the difference in length when the ancients wrote both in the bamboo slips. I think this is why there are two writing systems!"

After understanding what Shang Shaojian meant, Gary Donnelly and Colonel Weber fell silent.Just now, Gary Donnelly wanted to rant about Chinese and create two writing systems that are useless and add to the trouble of learning, but after he understood it, the words of a roll of bamboo slips and a cart of bamboo slips naturally appeared in his mind difference, and then he stopped talking.

He now seriously doubts that the heptapod had a similar development.

At this time, Dr. Banks, who was pondering for a long time, continued: "It's still different. In the previous research, we already know that we can't learn their spoken language by relying on their writing, and their writing is very different from English. The grammar of their words is a two-dimensional grammar for vision."

"A two-dimensional grammar for vision?" Shang Shaojian, who entered the role and decided to play his role well, murmured.

As he spoke, he picked up the pen on the table, and then began to write on the blank paper. After a while, he raised the paper to Banks and asked, "Like this?"

Louise Banks saw the words on the paper and couldn't help reading: "Research shows that the order of Chinese characters does not necessarily affect reading."

"Look carefully, Dr. Banks." Shang Shaojian reminded.

Only then did Banks read it carefully word by word, and then she was speechless, because she found that what Shang Shaojian wrote was actually: Research shows that the order of Chinese characters does not necessarily affect reading.

Realizing that he was in a hurry to identify the Chinese characters so that he misunderstood it in order to show his Chinese proficiency, Banks smiled wryly: "Mr. It's not the same at all."

"Okay, then you continue." Seeing that she seemed agitated, Shang Shaojian quickly comforted her in a warm voice.

Dr. Banks sighed secretly, she felt a little suspicious now that Mr. Shang did it on purpose, but she had no evidence.

But because Shang Shaojian used Chinese to talk about things twice, Dr. Banks decided to explain some differences between Qiwen and Chinese. She continued: "I once thought that Qiwen is a logographic language. But later I found that the statement that Qiwen is a logogram is not accurate, because in ordinary logograms, each character corresponds to a word in spoken language, but the logogram of the heptapod is not as we imagined. ways to relate to their spoken language”

At this time Shang Shaojian was about to speak again, but Banks keenly noticed that she continued to speak in order to block Shang Shaojian's mouth.

"Each character in Qiwen has its own meaning, and the meanings it can convey when combined with other words are almost endless, so we cannot make an accurate definition of Qiwen. The sentences formed by Qiwen are simply extremely complicated. There is not even a punctuation mark between the sentences, and there are really no sentence breaks, and the grammatical structure of the sentence depends entirely on the combination of the seven characters in the sentence.”

"With all due respect, Dr. Banks, so far I think Chinese is fully equipped with the characteristics you speak, especially when modern Chinese and ancient Chinese are combined, each character has its own meaning, and the words composed of each character can express in the future The meanings are also endless, and in ancient times, there was no punctuation in Chinese... Uh... well, you go on, you go on." Shang Shaojian finally held back again.

Dr. Banks resisted the urge to curse. She went to the computer and pulled out several heptapod texts, then pointed and said: "This is a sentence, you can put as many seven characters into the sentence as the heptapod likes. , can also be glued into a big ball, a big ball is also a sentence, or even a paragraph of text or a page of text, the difference lies in the size of the ball.”

After finishing speaking, Dr. Banks finally breathed a sigh of relief. She glanced at Shang Shaojian quietly, and said to herself: You shouldn't be able to speak classical Chinese this time, right?

Who would have thought that Shang Shaojian looked at Yue Yuanzhou and asked, "Sir, look at this."

"If you count how many characters can be packed according to the area, then any kind of language is fine, but obviously Dr. Banks doesn't mean that." Yue Yuanzhou shook his head. He didn't struggle with whether Chinese characters can be expressed in this way, but said: " What she meant was that there is no order in the heptapod writing, the whole sentence is written at the same time, there is no situation where the first line is written and the second is written, the whole sentence is written in one go, which means that the heptapod is written long before the first line is written. Already know how the entire sentence is laid out, so they can express the message of the entire sentence all at the same time."

"This Mr. Yue is right, that's it." Seeing that someone understood what she meant, Dr. Banks' heart finally eased, and she no longer needed to listen to Shang Shaojian speak Chinese.

(End of this chapter)