Riding the wind of rebirth

Gao Benhan had a very good method for conducting field research, which was to make word cards of 3,200 words. Whenever he arrived at a place, he would ask people to read the words to him. Then he would mark the words using a set of phonetic symbols that he designed. In the end, he obtained a huge "sample library" of dozens of dialects.

This is real hard work. If it weren't for the fact that Gao Benhan loved the Chinese language to his core and told everyone in Shandong dialect "I am originally Chinese", and if he didn't forget to promote in Europe that "Chinese characters are a beautiful and lovely lady, while Western characters are like a useful but ugly maid", it would be difficult for the Chinese people to do this.

Hu Shi once commented on European sinologists in the early 20th century: "Except for Pelliot and Karlgren, all others are foreign swindlers." There is some truth to this.

Zhou Zhi also felt that this method was entirely feasible, but as a Chinese, he saw more scientific methods than Gao Benhan's.

Let's take Cantonese as an example. Cantonese itself is divided into "refined language" and "vernacular language". The former is used in poetry, drama, and official documents. A typical example is the familiar Cantonese song;

The Cantonese language is what the Cantonese people speak in their daily lives. It contains a large number of slang and modal particles. Many special combinations of sounds and rhymes are often hidden in such slang and modal particles and are never used in formal occasions.

If these word cards are given to dialect speakers to read out, they will most likely use "elegant language" to express themselves, which means that people in that situation will be a bit "pretentious", which will lead to missing samples.

Therefore, when Zhou Zhi raised this question, Gu Youwen did not think that Zhou Zhi's idea was a fantasy. Instead, he said: "A senior in phonology has already thought of this problem. You can say that you think alike."

"Who is it?" Zhou Zhi couldn't help but feel a little happy: "Did this senior solve this problem?"

"It's solved, but it took a long time." Gu Youwen smiled and said, "This person's name is a bit strange, Zheng Zhang Shangfang, have you heard of him?"

"He! I've heard of him. He's the one who's doing ancient Chinese pronunciation!"

"Huh? You really know him?" Now it was Gu Youwen's turn to be surprised.

"He is a genius in phonology, he learned everything by himself, he is a role model for our generation." Zhou Zhi said. He would not tell Gu Youwen that in later generations, there was an uproar on the Internet because some people used the so-called "ancient sounds" that were difficult to understand to interpret "Guanju".

The "ancient sound" circulating on the Internet is said to use the "Zheng-Zhang language system".

However, Zhou Zhi knew at once that the pronunciation was that of a northerner, who had not even mastered the entering tone. There were only four tones, which did not even reach the nine tones and six tones of Cantonese. In addition, the pronunciation was full of many tongue-tickling sounds that were completely inconsistent with the traditional Chinese language, and overly obvious glottal stops. It was not that there was any major problem with the ancient sound system reconstructed by Zheng and Zhang, but that the way of reading it on the Internet still made the mistake that northerners do not listen to Cantonese, but only want to hold a Cantonese dictionary and read it out in Cantonese according to the pinyin annotations, which makes the reading of "Guanju" very funny.

The Book of Songs was collected by Confucius, who emphasized the use of "elegant language" in formal occasions. What is "elegant language"? It is the language used by the people around the capital of the Zhou Dynasty. Confucius thought it was very nice, so he called it "elegant language".

Even people who don't know a language at all can tell the quality of a reading from its reading, just like when a person who doesn't know English listens to a drama actor reading Shakespeare's operas, even though he doesn't understand, he still thinks it sounds very good. If the reading of "Guanju" doesn't sound good at all, there is only one explanation - the reader must have read it wrong.

  It's so difficult to pronounce, so hoarse, and so funny that it doesn't even rhyme. And you tell me that this is the ancient "elegant language" pronounced based on the "Zheng-Zhang reconstruction"?

It's wrong from the most basic logic.

Therefore, this is the fault of the later comers, not Zheng Zhang Shangfang's fault.

"I used to think his name was Zheng Zhang, but after reading his writings, I learned that his name was Zheng Zhang Shangfang, and then I thought he was a woman who took her husband's surname."

“Hahahaha…” Gu Youwen laughed, “He brought this upon himself, so he can’t blame anyone else. Foreigners who use his papers often refer to him as “she” and “her”, hahahaha…”

Afterwards, Gu Youwen began to tell Zhou Zhi the story of Zheng Zhang Shangfang. Zhou Zhi then realized that he, a time traveler pretending to be a "genius", was defeated instantly by the real genius.

Zheng Zhang Shangfang's original name was Zheng Xiangfang. When he was in middle school, he met five people with the same name. Some of them forgot to distinguish between high school and junior high school when writing letters, and they often opened each other's letters. So he changed his name to Zheng Zhang Xiangfang according to his parents' surnames to show his equal respect for his parents. At that time, he had a pen name called "Shangfang", which later became "Zheng Zhang Shangfang".

In the 1920s and 1930s, Zheng Zhang Shangfang's father was a warp thread master at Wenzhou Oujiang Cloth Factory. Because he participated in a labor strike, he was wanted by the Kuomintang authorities and was forced to leave his hometown alone.

Therefore, Zheng Zhangshangfang was fostered in his grandfather's home in Shipu Village, Yongzhong Street since he was a child. At that time, his grandfather had a book of miscellaneous characters left over from the Qing Dynasty, which classified and recorded the daily characters of Wenzhou dialect. It was the first time that young Zheng Zhangshangfang knew the written expressions of Wenzhou dialect, which aroused his great interest in the dialect.

When he was in junior high school, his Chinese teacher encouraged students to collect proverbs to enrich their vocabulary, so he took the lead in organizing a proverb interest group. Many dialects in Wenzhou are difficult to record in Chinese characters, so in addition to looking up words in the dictionary, he tried to record them in pinyin for those that could not be recorded in Chinese characters, taking the first step in exploring how to overcome the difficulty of recording dialects, and became fascinated by how to pinyin dialects.

Later, he found "Research on Modern Wu Dialect" written by Zhao Yuanren in Wenzhou Library. The book recorded a complete set of methods of recording Wenzhou dialect using international phonetic symbols, which enabled him to truly explore the scientific path of language research.

New China was founded just after he graduated from junior high school. Three years after graduating from high school, Zheng Zhang Shangfang worked as a member of the geophysical prospecting team of the Ministry of Geology, a teacher at Wuma Middle School in WZ City, a cataloger at the Municipal Library, and also worked as a worker in a fishery machinery factory for more than ten years during special years.

In order to study Wenzhou dialect, Zheng Zhangshangfang often listened to people quarreling on the streets of Wenzhou and recorded the quarreling language on cards. He said that this was one of the methods of studying language. Hard work paid off. By 1966, he had accumulated more than 30,000 slang dialect cards and collected 64 books and materials related to Wenzhou dialect. Although half of the books were confiscated during the turmoil, they had laid a solid and extensive foundation for his field research.

I have always been keen on self-studying linguistics. In the ten years after 1955, I published more than ten articles on pinyin and dialects. (End of this chapter)