Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1516: The Prudence of Big Bosses

"Regarding the variations of the heart, we are familiar with the characters '忄' beside the vertical heart and '忄' at the bottom of the character Gong. In the seal script era, these hearts were all complete forms of the heart."

"In the official script era, the heart as the left radical was squeezed into a long strip. Compared with the 'heart' in other positions, it has undergone great deformation. There are two reasons. One is the heart after the official transformation. The font itself has become flat and long. If used as the radical of the left and right structural characters, the entire font will inevitably become more flat and long. Secondly, for the convenience of writing, the curved hook in the middle of the heart character will become vertical, which will undoubtedly reduce the writing trajectory. It’s a matter of convenience.”

"The only radical that has not been deformed should be the base of the character heart that supports the upper part of the upper and lower structures. They occupy half of the position of the square character, which is enough to show one's own strokes. However, in the pursuit of faster running script and In cursive script, does the bottom of the word "心" also deform?"

As Zhou Zhi explained, he began to write the four characters "Thoughts of Loyalty and Forgiveness", from small seal script to official script to regular script, and then to running script or cursive script. The bottom of the word "heart" in this component gradually changed from the shape of a lotus to the ordinary character heart. , then turned into a wavy line during the rapid movement of the pen, and finally turned into a horizontal line.

"Look! At this moment, the heart becomes a horizontal line."

"This provides an idea for the regularization of cursive writing." Zhou Zhi said: "If it is a simple Chinese character, in the regular script form, a horizontal line is rarely used to replace the bottom of the character "心"."

As he spoke, he added a horizontal line under the word "田" and shook his head: "It really doesn't look good."

In the midst of everyone's laughter, Zhou Zhi wrote the three words "Ning", "Worry" and "Qing", and then wrote a variant of the word with a horizontal line instead of heart next to it: "But in more complex glyphs, often This kind of replacement will not destroy the beauty of calligraphy, what do you think? "

Zhou Zhi is a master of calligraphy, and showing off his chalk calligraphy every time he attends class is one of the highlights of the "Oracle Bone Inscriptions Appreciation" class.

Now everyone compares it and feels that what he said makes sense. In these three words, replacing the heart with a horizontal line not only does not affect the font style, but adds a sense of simplicity and change.

"What I just said are all theories, but would the ancients have thought of what we can think of?"

While everyone was discussing in private, Zhou Zhi directly gave a positive answer: "The answer is of course yes."

"The earliest records of the word '爱' in regular cursive script that can be found so far are the "Kou Ping Epitaph" from the Northern Wei Dynasty, which dates back more than 1,500 years ago, and the "Cui Qin Statue Stele" from the Northern Wei Dynasty."

"The recording time of the two tablets is the same as the second year of the Great Wei Dynasty, which is enough to show that this change was considered a 'new trend' writing method in the Wei tablets at that time."

"Later on, there were more such uses. For example, in Ming Dynasty Wen Zhengming's "Lotus Society Illustrated Notes" book stickers, he used both love writing methods, and others such as the Song Dynasty's new edition of Ancient Women's Biographies, and many more Such 'vulgar words' are used in engraving books. "

"Furthermore, these popular books are particularly fond of the cursive and regularized writing method of love, and even invented a new variation, which is to add a dot on the upper right side of the word "Friend" to become '箮'."

"This last method of writing was used in the 'Dear and Sincere' inscription written by Kai Gongshen for the Whampoa Military Academy. I believe it is easy to find information on the island."

"So this classmate, the word love in cursive script is not only found in simplified Chinese characters, it is also found on your island."

There was gentle laughter in the classroom, and then it turned into applause. Even the teachers from Baodao joined in the applause.

The girl from before stood up again, blushed and bowed to Zhou Zhi: "Thank you, teacher, for the 'Dear and Sincere' inscription you mentioned, we will go back and check it after class, but I still have one question to ask, that That's why the four-point bases of fish, fishing boats, and fish are all simplified into one horizontal line, but the characters for 'bear', 'ran', and 'burn' are not simplified. It’s a little unsimplified, doesn’t it seem a bit casual?”

"This is a very good question." Zhou Zhi did not show any dissatisfaction, but expressed great appreciation for the girl's question, and even clapped twice, making the Baodao girl blush even more.

"If we look at the oracle bones of fish, we can see that the field in the middle is the body of the fish, with the dorsal fin on top and the pectoral and pelvic fins on the bottom."

"The biggest feature of the dorsal fin is that the pectoral and pelvic fins are simplified into a horizontal line. First of all, it does not affect the general characteristics of the characters. Secondly, this kind of writing method often appears in running script and cursive script. Now we will regularize the cursive script and follow the general principle. It’s completely feasible.”

"But bear can't." Zhou Zhi wrote the word "can" on the blackboard, and then added three dots below: "Because there is another character in our Chinese characters that is very close to bear, but below it is three dots. The pronunciation is 'mud'."

"It is said that after Gun was killed, he turned into Huang Neng and sank into Yuyuan."

"If we simply simplify the four dots into a horizontal line, then there is no way to distinguish between bear and energy."

"But why not simplify the four-dot base of the character "ran"? Because it is a pictophonetic character. The four-dot base is different from the four-dot base of the character fish. It carries this important information, that is, the 'shaped side', which is fire. Different writing.”

"If you simply simplify it, the important information in this text will be truly lost, just like what the male classmate just made fun of."

"This is the reason why the four points of 'Xiong', 'Ran', and 'Ran' have not been simplified. This is not caused by the simplification plan being hasty and careless, but on the contrary, it is the result of the great efforts and thorough thinking of the forefathers. An expression of seriousness and responsibility for Chinese civilization and writing.”

The classroom burst into warm applause again.

"Generally speaking, the simplification of Chinese characters and common sayings is itself a manifestation of adaptation to use and dissemination, and this method does not only exist in New China, but also existed from the pre-Qin Dynasty to the Republic of China, almost throughout the period from the birth of writing , the entire time period up to today.”

"But the most successful ones can be identified as two."

"For the first time, after Qin unified the six kingdoms, Qin Xiaozhuan was adopted as the standard font throughout the country. Compared with the previous scripts of various countries that were developed from oracle bone inscriptions, Qin Xiaozhuan also underwent many reasonable simplifications and mergers. It was the first A large-scale, successful text innovation.”

"The second time was the "General List of Simplified Chinese Characters" implemented in my country in 56 years, which played a decisive role in rapidly popularizing cultural learning in the country and improving the cultural quality of the entire nation."

"To this day, because of the lack of understanding, understanding and research on the plan at that time, this plan is often stigmatized by some people. In this way, they want to show that they are idiosyncratic in behavior, unique in thinking, and The so-called "character" of "everyone is drunk but I am sober" is actually just for the sake of sensationalism."

(End of this chapter)