Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1812 Academic Direction

"Of course you have to master your own knowledge." Mr. Gu nodded in agreement, but then shook his head: "But these are family studies, so you can take your time. There is no need to rush. It is not suitable to use them as a subject to cope with school."

"Your uncle is also a family scholar, but he is now working on the Jiyun in the capital. He has cooperated with several overseas libraries. Through your engine, he has found five Song editions and photocopied Song editions of the Jiyun, as well as more than 30 notes on the achievements of Qing people in describing the Jiyun."

"He planned to use these as proofreading editions to conduct a large-scale and comprehensive proofreading of the most widely circulated Qing Dynasty Gu Guangqi's revised Cao Lianting edition of Jiyun, compile it into the Jiyun Proofreading Edition, and then conduct research."

"Jiyun" is also a rhyme book of the Song Dynasty, compiled during the reign of Emperor Renzong. The great scholar Song Qi believed that "Guangyun" mostly used "old texts" and included too few characters, so he wrote to the emperor requesting that it be expanded.

This book uses exactly the same rhyme groups as Guangyun, but the rhyme characters, the order of some rhyme items, and the rules for common use and unique use noted under the rhyme items are slightly different.

If Guangyun is more accommodating to the sounds and rhymes of the Tang Dynasty, which is the "ancient language" for the people of the Song Dynasty, then Jiyun is like the Mandarin dictionary of the people of the Song Dynasty, taking into account the "modern language" of the people of the Song Dynasty.

Therefore, "Jiyun" is of great significance for studying the migration and transformation of standard sounds of ancient languages, that is, "prosody evolution", and for deducing the true pronunciation of characters by the ancients.

In addition, "Jiyun" includes more than 50,000 words commonly used in the Song Dynasty, which is twice the number of words in "Guangyun", and many repeated words and vulgar words are also included.

The repeated characters are the four ways of writing the word "回" mentioned by Kong Yiji. The vulgar characters are the substitute characters commonly used by the people, the simplified characters, which are used in the imperial examinations and the kind that would immediately result in the candidate being rejected if discovered by the examiners.

At that time, there was an examinee named Zhao Xu in Sichuan. He was selected into the top three by the examiners and was handed over to Emperor Renzong for selection. Renzong discovered that he wrote the "口" radical of the word "惟" as "厶", so he failed the exam.

For example, in the word "闲", the "月" in the door is a formal character, while the "日" in the door is a vulgar character. Small vendors can use it casually, but it cannot be used in formal occasions such as official documents.

But what’s funny is that as time goes by, many vulgar characters have gradually become standard characters because they are easier to write.

This trend was used by scholars during the process of promoting simplified characters after the founding of the People's Republic of China. In fact, there are no more than five newly created characters in the simplified version of characters, and the rest all come from ancient characters and common methods.

Some people in later generations attacked simplified characters as fabricated, which is totally untenable. For example, "从", "丽", and "万" in simplified characters are almost exactly the same as oracle bone inscriptions, which is equivalent to returning to the original state of characters, and has gone through a process from simple to complex, and then from complex to simple.

Therefore, those who criticize simplified characters and advocate traditional characters are not those who have much knowledge of traditional characters. Instead, they are mostly those who have not read widely and just follow the crowd.

Therefore, "Jiyun" is also of great significance in studying the changes of Chinese characters.

According to Gu Youwen, Zhou Zhi should follow his son's research direction, develop on the basis of his own school, and advance the study of phonology to a higher level, which is in line with the requirements. Zhou Zhi secretly cried out in his heart, who is the teacher uncle? He was the main force when the state organized the compilation of the "Chinese Dictionary" ten years ago. In addition, he has been continuously improving over the years. Now he is even happier to retire and leave his teaching position to focus on academic studies. Now the state has entrusted him with the important research practice and historical responsibility in the history of "Jiyun" research. He has stayed in the capital almost all year round. Zhou Zhi went to the capital several times to meet him but was rejected. He was almost hidden in the pile of old papers.

Zhou Zhi asked himself that he could not compare to a person who was so focused to the extreme, as a guy like himself who was not very good at doing things.

With such specialization, Gu Zhenduo set himself a time limit of ten years. Counting from the year before last, it is estimated that the book "Jiyun Jiaoben" will be completed by 2013.

Seeing Zhou Zhi's awkward expression, Gu Youwen smiled and said, "He is an old-school intellectual, and his methods are not advisable. For example, now you have information technology to support you, so many basic skills that previously required rote memorization can be eliminated. With search engines, you can also save a lot of time wasted on searching for citations. So what took him five to ten years to accomplish, you only need one or two years."

"That's not right." Zhou Zhi said, "It's okay to polish your article like this, but once you're in a presentation, if someone asks you some related questions, you don't have to search for them first and then tell them the answers, right? And if you don't have the basic skills, you won't know how to search even if you put a search engine in front of you. If you don't have any foundation in literature and history, using a search engine will be a waste of time."

"No matter what, it's much better to have tools." Gu Youwen said: "In the future, the distance between our discipline and general literature and history will be even greater."

"Why?" Zhou Zhi asked.

"Because the phonetics and rhymes cannot be retrieved." Gu Youwen said: "Using words to describe sounds will itself result in a large amount of information loss. For example, the four tones of Ping, Shang, Qu and Ru in Shuzhong, Cantonese and Hakka are actually slightly different, and the difference with Mandarin is even greater."

"So if we go back to the Song Dynasty and read Song Ci, or even go back to the Tang Dynasty and read Tang poetry, or even go back to the pre-Qin Dynasty and read Chu Ci and the Book of Songs, it is extremely difficult for us to simply judge what the rhyme was like at that time through basic rhyme books."

"We can only start with the fanqie of rhyme books, collect all the phonological fanqie and make statistics, and then deduce the sounds and voices of Song and Tang rhymes from the changes of various rhyme books before and after, combined with various rhyme texts of the same period, and the contents related to rhyme recorded in the notes."

"But these two things are ultimately to be heard with the ears, not seen with the eyes, and our skill is to study the true nature of historical voices through the sound information recorded in writing. You can imagine how difficult it is..." Zhou Zhi continued with Gu Youwen's topic.

"You should be proud, right? Only we Chinese have the means to record sounds and rhymes thousands of years ago, which allows us to get a glimpse of ancient sounds. It is already the best among all the remains of civilizations in the world." Gu Youwen smiled and said, "As for saying it is inaccurate and has undergone changes, just look at the modern English language. Even with modern phonetic symbols and ready-made sound samples as an aid, it has undergone such great changes after spreading to Australia and North America. The phonetic symbols are the same but the pronunciations are different. They are living examples."

At this point, Gu Youwen suddenly thought of a topic: "Eh? Then can we deduce the Song and Tang rhymes, then read them out and store them as voice information?"

"Then we might be scolded badly." Zhou Zhi held his forehead with his hand. "By then, each of us will have his own reasons. Among the languages ​​with more Tang and Song sounds, such as Hakka, Cantonese, Southwestern Mandarin, and Huguang Mandarin, which one should we use as the basis? And the whole process of the migration of northern languages ​​to the south, which time point should we take as the basis for Song rhyme? Which time point should we take as the basis for Tang rhyme?"