Ming Dynasty and New Rome and Infinite Magic Machine

Chapter 1163 Tram
The poorly maintained tracks have become uneven and the trains running on them are shaky.

Titus sat in his seat, this was a scene he had never seen before. Everything around him looked like civilization had faded away, and the traces of human activity here were left after the fire, and even footprints could not be seen in the deep grass.

On the concrete walls where grass cannot grow, vines or moss will spread up.

Although there were no signs of human life, you could occasionally see animal trails in the grass, with rabbits and wild boars running freely in the grass. The urban landscape that originally belonged to Edo was completely replaced by wilderness.

Titus's "mobile phone" is just a mobile phone, not a spiritual device. It has no other functions except for communication, so he can't take pictures of the scene here. Otherwise, he would probably take a lot of photos along the way as a souvenir.

He thought that after the fall of Rome, many cities outside Constantinople would probably become like this. After humans left, nature would swallow everything up.

This is the foreseeable future for Rome. However, he can still submit a photo of its precursor on the other side of the earth to the magazine - he is so relaxed.

After all, as a phlogiston diver, his soul had been extracted from the mortal path. Before the end of his life, he could laugh at everything in the world, and he would not die no matter what he did.

This is why he felt miserable that he could not do more to save Rome. Because no one ordered them to do so, these fresh troops who would not die no matter how hard they fought did not play a big role.

But now, they can indeed do their part. Although it is too late to save the Roman Empire now, it is still not too late to give the Roman Empire a decent justice.

"Click." Although he didn't bring a cell phone, he did bring an ordinary camera. Facing the scenery outside the window, he pressed the shutter button -

As soon as the shutter button was pressed, the whole car suddenly braked.

"What's going on?" Titus looked up. He nearly dropped his camera.

"It seems something has happened." Ii looked forward and saw the conductor pick up the intercom and say a few words, then lowered his head and took out a sign from under his seat and hung it on the ceiling. It read:

"Personal accident, temporary suspension of train operation, etc."

"What's written there?" Titus asked, "It's all in Chinese, why can't I understand it?"

"Because the writing style is different. Although we also use Chinese characters to express our own language, our spoken language is different from Chinese. What you see is 'Houwen', a style that is a compromise between Japanese spoken language and Chinese written language. This 'Hou' is a substitute for many particles. All official documents of the shogunate are written in this Houwen. The meaning of this sentence is..."

“Wait a minute,” Titus asked. “You need to tell me how this text reads. I need to understand what you’re doing.”

"Do you want to read it? But we usually don't. Houwen is a written language and cannot be read. Even the order of the text is in Chinese. But if you want to read it, please remove the word 'Hou' and just read the rest of the text in Chinese characters."

"Let me see - due to a personal accident, the operation of the train will be temporarily suspended? So because of the personal accident, the operation of this train will be suspended for an hour?" "95% is close. 'Issued' does not mean one hour, but temporarily, so the second half of the sentence means 'will be suspended'. You can read all the official documents of the shogunate in this way. As long as you know Chinese, you can read 95% of the articles even if you know nothing about Japanese."

"Can I even write to you?"

"Yes." Ii replied, "I know Chinese, and we can communicate in Chinese. But even if you don't know Chinese, you can communicate directly with most people in writing. Because although not everyone can speak Chinese, most people can write Chinese characters. As long as you write the words, everyone will understand. If I understand correctly, you should be able to do the same in Korea or Ryukyu."

"Don't Koreans speak Chinese?" Titus was shocked. "I went to Songlinguan, a Korean restaurant in Beijing, and everyone there spoke Chinese."

"Has North Korea become like this? Perhaps it's just that North Koreans who go to Beijing to work are particularly good at speaking Chinese. North Koreans still have their own language, but it's just more vulgar than Chinese. I remember that North Koreans don't even have their own 'Houwen'. Their written language is completely uncompromised Chinese. The spoken and written languages ​​are completely separated."

"I see they have some horizontal and vertical symbols?"

"Yes, that's the Korean phonetic symbol. If you look at it yourself, Japanese also has a phonetic symbol called 'kana'."

"Where?" He looked at the sign.

"It's not on this piece of paper. There is usually no Houwen - or it can be seen occasionally if it is written for a long time. Under normal circumstances, we will avoid using kana in Houwen, and we will use Chinese characters wherever Chinese characters can be used."

"Perhaps this is the future of Latin." Titus found that he had gained quite a lot this time. A brief cultural exchange allowed him to see something very similar to what happened in the West.

Rome also used a language called "Academic Aurora". This language only retained the grammatical elements of Latin, and all nouns that can be written in Chinese characters were written in Chinese characters. This writing method greatly saved space, and the word formation based on Chinese characters also made scientific terms easier to remember and could be mutually intelligible with Aurora.

Although Latin currently uses Chinese characters to help express meaning, the spoken and written languages ​​are not separated. The Chinese characters added are only written as Chinese characters, but they are actually still pronounced according to the Latin pronunciation - however, this situation is currently loosening.

Based on the research results of academic Aurora, the "second generation of Aurora vocabulary" has recently been produced, that is, new scientific terms and new concepts based on Chinese characters. These concepts often have no corresponding concepts in Latin, so they can only be directly pronounced as Chinese characters.

It is conceivable that the advanced Latin vocabulary will be replaced by Chinese characters as this trend continues. By then, except for the native words in spoken language, all other words will probably give way to Chinese characters. By then, Latin will probably really die.

"But, never mind." Titus shook his head. "The empire is about to end. What's the point of speaking Latin? Let them die. We are all clean. Now that things have come to this, let's just go sightseeing."

While the car was parked, he took out his camera and prepared to go down to see the scenery.

"I want to see who was hit and why he was so unlucky."

(End of this chapter)