eastern european eagle

Chapter 17 The Techniques of Writing

Don't know what those boyars think, but Peter has already begun to show his father another fruit.

"Father, how is it?"

Mircea looked at a large sheet of paper in front of him, with letters like their own, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.

"My son, I didn't expect you to bring me more than one surprise."

"From now on, Wallachia has a formal script."

The military conquest of the Roman Empire, the development of trade and the spread of Christianity in the 2nd century AD promoted the Romanization process of Dacia.During this process, ordinary people gradually came into contact with and became familiar with Latin.Due to the very limited channels of dissemination of text at that time, the written literary language had little influence on Dacia, and the people accepted the popular Latin, which was mainly spoken.With popular Latin as the main body, combined with some elements of the original Dacian language, a new common language-Romanian was formed.

After the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, although Romanian was influenced by various Slavic languages ​​​​in neighboring countries and absorbed some vocabulary, the foundation of Latin in the language backbone has never been shaken.After the 7th century AD, with the formation of the Romanian nation, the Romanian language basically completed its evolution.

It should not be called Romanian now, it should be called Wallachian.Because Romania has not yet been established.

Romance belongs to the Romance languages ​​of the Indo-European language family.Also belonging to this language family are French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.Romanian has a large vocabulary similarity with other languages ​​of the same language group, for example, it has 77% similarity with Italian, 75% similarity with French, and 71% similarity with Spanish.Among the Romance languages, Romanian belongs to the eastern branch, and later Romanian languages ​​are written in the Latin alphabet because they are influenced by French, which also belongs to the Latin family.But Romania is in the Orthodox cultural circle, so it can also be written in Cyrillic. (I used to think it was very strange. Romania has Eastern Slavs in the east, Western Slavs in the north, and Yugoslavs in the south. How did they not be assimilated?)
From the 10th to the 12th century, the invasion of the Slavs forced the Vlach people living on the south bank of the Danube to migrate southward. They separated from the natives and formed a variety of dialects.But it is inseparable from the local language.

The alphabet shown to Mircea is in Cyrillic, and there is another in Latin.If you were speaking Latin in Constantinople right now, you might get beat up.

"Well, my boy. You have done a lot for Wallachia."

"Without father, I can do more for Wallachia."

Grand Duke Mircea decided to promote Wallachian script writing, but Peter went one step ahead and ordered the chamber of commerce to use Wallachian script when doing transactions with the port.

The finalization of the Wallachian characters was also a groundbreaking event. When Grand Duke Mircea let Archbishop Carol read these characters, he directly said that it was a miracle of God.

With writing comes printing and copying, paper is essential, but more for economic reasons than technical ones.Manuscripts were often copied on parchment (made from broken skins of sheep) or vellum (made from calfskin), which were used by woodblock printing when the significance of the printed matter was less important than affordability.But a book as thick as the Bible required the use of as many as 170 sheets of calfskin or 300 sheets of sheepskin, and a lack of paper would render the prevailing technique of mechanical reproduction useless, even if it could be economically and quickly produced in large batches. In the 12th century, the Arabs who obtained technology from China introduced papermaking to Spain.For the next two centuries, papermaking developed slowly throughout most of Europe.

Well, the four great inventions of papermaking, printing, compass, and gunpowder were developing very slowly in Eastern Europe at this time.Peter had to do it himself.

Because the Islamic regime in the Middle East does not allow the secret recipe of papermaking to be leaked, it is not feasible to produce it through external forces.However, this can stump him?

Cai Lun of the Eastern Han Dynasty used rags, broken fishing nets and other things to make paper that was easier to write on.After that, people also summed up four steps.

The first is the separation of raw materials, which is to use retting or steaming to degumming the raw materials and disperse them into fibers;
The second is beating, which is to cut the fibers by cutting and beating, and make the fibers broom to become pulp;
The third is papermaking, that is, the pulp is infiltrated into a slurry, and then the pulp is scooped with a paper scoop, so that the pulp is interwoven into a thin sheet of wet paper on the scoop;
The fourth is drying, that is, drying or drying the wet paper, and peeling it off becomes paper.

And those things are available in towns and villages every day, and the source of raw materials is here.

In addition to papermaking, it is movable type printing.The famous Gutenberg in Europe is still a few years away, and now he is only printing some copper plates to engrave icons and playing cards, and he has no ability to spread knowledge on a large scale.

At this time, the East has been printing with movable type for more than 300 years.Use clay to make blanks with the same specifications, and engrave anti-body characters on one end. The raised height of the characters is the same as the thickness of the edge of a copper coin, and it is hardened by fire to become a single clay movable type.In order to meet the needs of typesetting, several or even dozens of commonly used characters are prepared for use when repeated in the same edition.When encountering rare words that are not commonly used, if there is no preparation in advance, you can use them as you make them.

As long as enough individual movable type is prepared in advance, the imposition can be made at any time, which greatly speeds up the plate-making time.After the movable type plate is printed, it can be disassembled, and the movable type can be reused, and the movable type occupies less space than the engraved block, so it is easy to store and keep.In this way, the superiority of movable type is shown.If you only print two or three copies, it is not easy. If you print hundreds or thousands of copies, the work efficiency will be extremely impressive. Not only can you save a lot of manpower and material resources, but you can also greatly improve the printing speed and quality.

It will all take time, but Peter is ready.

Moreover, Peter also proposed to Mircea to move the capital.Although Kemplonge is still expanding, if it wants to expand its territory in the future, it will need a better capital.

Mircea thought carefully about this suggestion, but for the time being he had to get the army in order.After all, it was passed at the Boyar Council.

(End of this chapter)