Since the Accounting: A Chronicle of the Roman Khanate

Chapter 385 Master Taicai Failed Cultural Transformation
Regarding this topic, Guo Kang actually had nothing to do.

In other words, at this point, the theory itself is not just a dispute in linguistics, but has been linked to other issues—such as the understanding of civilization, the cultural policy of the Purple Horde, and the revision of Will always be thinking.

Guo Kang has never cared about this.In fact, there is no standard answer to this kind of thing, and he often doesn't know whether his future experience is correct.

Moreover, this thing has a "self-proving" problem: for example, if when the account was first established, it was announced that the languages ​​​​of all places are Roman dialects, and everyone can easily find various differences to refute this theory.

However, the Purple Horde has been carrying out enlightenment education according to this theory for decades. As a result, at least in Romania in a broad sense, all languages ​​can indeed be regarded as dialects.

Because language changes very quickly.If a language is artificially determined, and then look for differences, or even intentionally create differences, it will be easy to separate; on the contrary, although some adjacent areas speak different words, they are not completely incomprehensible.A little standardization, let everyone change a few common words and pronunciation, and the gap can be greatly narrowed.

Therefore, Guo Kang thinks this kind of thing is a political issue.In particular, whether the status of Chinese in the Purple Horde is similar to the "official language" of Latin in the west is a question of definition.

Moreover, the current situation in the Purple Horde Khanate is considered a relatively "serious" discussion.You know, in some cases, the development of things can even be attributed to more nonsensical factors.

In Guo Kang's time, Chinese had experienced "separation of language and white".But this process is not as simple as it sounds, but is full of various intentional or unintentional misinterpretations, taken for granted, and violent arguments.

It was Hu Shi, a famous master during the period of the Republic of China, who first formally put forward this concept.The source of his theory is simple and straightforward: Europeans used colloquial languages ​​to replace Latin, a dead language, so China should also use colloquial "living characters", that is, vernacular Chinese, to replace the already "dead languages" of classical Chinese.

It is easy to see that in this theory, classical Chinese and Latin are corresponding roles.

However, European missionaries have long held different opinions.In their view, Chinese characters as a whole correspond to Latin.They believe that in East Asia, Chinese characters are actually an "international language" equivalent to Latin, regardless of whether it is classical or vernacular.People in many other countries can write Chinese characters even if they don't speak them, and even communicate with each other directly through Chinese characters.This is an obvious example.

Therefore, in the eyes of European scholars, both classical Chinese and vernacular belong to the category of "common language" and are a "sacred silent language" that maintains a huge empire.The dialects of various places correspond to the local spoken languages ​​in Europe.

Similarly, in the dialects of the literati in the Republic of China, although vernacular is called a lower-level, informal language, its history is not short, and its cultural accumulation is also very rich.Hu Shi himself later admitted that their role in vernacular Chinese was far inferior to that of Dante and Boccaccio in Italian, or Shakespeare in English, not to mention the status of the latter few who established schools.

From this perspective, the results of the New Culture Movement are also completely different from those of the European Cultural Movement.

This is actually the biggest inspiration for Guo Kang: Although Chinese is closely related to the military, even if it is demilitarized and popularized, this vernacular Roman Chinese character system can still be continued.

Of course, during the entire New Culture Movement, there were actually similar European attempts.Some literati tried to use Chinese characters as phonetic symbols to write dialect literature.Xu Zhimo, for example, wrote Wu language poems recorded in Chinese characters.

This kind of usage is probably similar to the behavior of the ancient Egyptians for a while. They used words as phonetic symbols, so it is actually not impossible.However, there were not many attempts in this area even at that time.Although he received strong support from Hu Shi, he was not well-known in later generations.

As for why Hu Shi himself didn’t study this kind of real “local writing” and didn’t notice the contradiction between it and the vernacular, the result may be very simple—he wouldn’t...

Moreover, "no" is not the only aspect.The importance of regional oral writing in Europe is because it is closely linked to politics and state building.In the narratives of European countries, the process of modern enlightenment is the process of the disintegration of classical and medieval empires.As the old empires crumbled, so did the lingua franca.Emerging countries build a set of language and script based on the local spoken language as one of the foundations of the nation-state.

In the eyes of later generations of scholars, Hu Shi did not understand the actual meaning of this oral writing.His theory is also very rote, because what he focuses on is always writing, not pronunciation. This is not only not part of the nation-state model, but is exactly the kind of "imperial tradition" that he fiercely criticizes.

In a hard analogy, Latin was finally abolished in European countries, and as a result, French began to be popularized in various countries.Before the enlightenment, everyone spoke the lingua franca; after the enlightenment, everyone spoke the lingua franca in another form.After making a lot of trouble, we still haven't been able to establish independent writing systems in various places. Isn't this enlightenment in vain?
This problem was also pointed out at the time, but Hu Shi didn't understand it, and he didn't take any substantive measures.It wasn't until the early 50s that he realized...

Similarly, Hu Shi and others thought at the time that the vernacular and the phoneticization of Chinese characters were not contradictory, but had a sequential relationship, so they both got their advocacy.However, judging from European experience, if the vernacular is promoted and the spoken language and written language are brought closer together, it will actually crowd out the ecological niche of Pinyin.

In addition, France has proved that modern countries already have the ability to unify spoken language, and this vernacular and corresponding spoken language will naturally replace local writing.Aren't these two points of view contradicting each other?

Regarding this problem, the masters of the Republic of China also did not propose any feasible solutions.What was realized in the end was the rapid expansion of the vernacular and the corresponding standard spoken language, which cut off the possibility of other routes, and even the Romanized Pinyin was reduced to an auxiliary tool.So much so that until a hundred years later, Europeans still believed that Seris had inherited more of the legacy of the ancient empire, rather than becoming a standard nation-state like the Balkans.

It stands to reason that many of these people have experience studying abroad, but I don't know what they learned in the end...

So it can only be said that sometimes the choice of path may be very simple, as long as the masters have enough dishes, it can be realized.Sometimes history is so dumbfounding, where to make sense...

(End of this chapter)