Chapter 038 Hegemony

The artistic achievements of the Chinese character writing system are 3,000 light years away from the alphabet, and our great calligraphers are full of stars and sweat, but when have you ever heard of any great calligraphers in alphabet writing?

Wang Fang is also a part of the collective memory of more than a billion Asians, and he once lamented the achievements of the art of calligraphy, and he especially liked the thin gold body of the dead ghost emperor Song Huizong. National pride makes it difficult for him to accept that such a great artistic crystallization is not a representative of advanced productive forces in the history of the development of writing. Even he would break out in a cold sweat at the thought of this.

Our Chinese character is a type of hieroglyph. Just as money must be anchored to a precious metal in its infancy, so as to issue a currency of communication, you must convince your audience why this symbol represents a pig, a sheep, a man, a bird.

Therefore, hieroglyphs are the "image-based" linguistic currency. The image-based design scheme is also the inevitable choice of the interface of the Apple mobile phone at the beginning of the design, and it is also because users do not know what the mobile phone can do, and they need the image-based design to guide them into the world of smart phones.

However, every character of the hieroglyphs is a simple painting, and no matter how simple a picture is, it is still a painting, and it is difficult to write. We can take Roman numerals as an example, I, II, III, V, why is four not IIII? That's the need for simplification. Arabic numerals are even simpler. The simpler it is, the more people like to use it.

Early human writing systems, including Sumerian cuneiform and ancient Egyptian scripts more than 5,000 years ago, followed the principle of image-based. For example, the number of cuneiform scripts decreased from about 1,000 in the early Bronze Age to about 400 in the late Bronze Age.

We can imagine that in order to learn and use it easily, hieroglyphs will definitely develop in the direction of becoming simpler and simpler among the people. But why are Chinese characters becoming more and more complex? Examining the policy of the first emperor of "the same book and the same track", we can get a glimpse.

Qin Shi Huang prescribed the form of the writing system in the form of an extremely complicated official script. It can be seen that the empire of great unity sometimes does something against humanity. It is estimated that the decision-makers at that time were also unable to give up the artistic achievements of the ancient Lishu, and if the Qin Empire had lived for a few hundred more years, it would have been difficult for us to use the Lishu until now.

The political system of the Qin Empire was a legalist established by the Shang Dynasty, which punished the law harshly and was extremely cruel to the people. Cruelty was not the original intention of the Legalists. The Legalists of the Warring States Period were in the initial stage of the idea of the rule of law, which was too rigid, and if the old king was given to travel to the Qin Empire, he could build a system to improve the rule of law 1.0 to the king.

The main thing is to give the common people the right to appeal, and the judicial magistrate can create the law according to the specific circumstances of the matter, which is now Anglo-American case law. With this kind of flexibility, the law will not kill people because of force majeure such as weather changes, and Chen Sheng and Wu Guang will not rise up.

Of course, the fate of the traverser Lao Wang is estimated to be similar to that of Shang Yingjun, and most of the cars are cracked. After all, the power of a great imperial monarch is too great, there is no dispute among the countries, there is no potential opponent, his thinking will not bend, Lao Tzu said that the official book is the official book, and the craftsman will make a mark when he is working.

Moreover, the great empire had enough peasants to feed a large number of ruling classes, and here, the written word became a good totem to distinguish the ruling class from the common people, and the complexity and artistic possibility of Chinese characters became sought after characteristics.

On the other side of the Pamirs, in the Mediterranean, where various peoples competed, a calculating commercial state emerged: Phoenicia. The Phoenicians invented the alphabet to take simplification to the extreme, and this easy-to-learn and easy-to-write writing system has swept across Asia, Africa and Europe since its birth, becoming the originator of all alphabets.

Bi Sheng's invention of movable type printing did not catch on because the inherent complexity of Chinese characters hindered the spread of culture. Until now, Google has ushered in the era of web fonts, a technology that cannot be exploited by the kanji culture (including Japanese) because the cost of making kanji into online fonts is too high.

Chinese characters are not suitable for programming, just think about what it would be like to program with Chinese characters if we didn't learn Arabic numerals and use things like "one, two, three" in equations. The Japanese language is also not suitable, and due to the complexity of the language, it is almost inevitable that the Japanese, who once boasted of surpassing the American imperialists, would fall behind in the age of software.

The only bright spot in the software age for the Japanese was the invention of the programming language Ruby by Yukihiro Matsumoto, but Ruby's popularity is due to the creation of a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) RubyOnRails by the American DHH, a program dedicated to the development of websites, taking advantage of the flexibility of Ruby, which is suitable for development of domain-specific languages.

It takes the alphabet to make Ruby. The biggest feature of the alphabetic language is that it is easy to create new characters, for example: Marie Curie discovered a new element, in honor of her homeland Poland, which had disappeared at that time, and named it Po, while the Chinese dictionary had to be reprinted to add polonium.

The Anglo-American people in the Anglo-American special theory are the people who give full play to this characteristic, which is in the same vein as their common law system, which believes that the flexibility of language must be respected, the use of non-governmental institutions to regulate the use of words, and the new words that are compiled into famous dictionaries are basically generally accepted by society, and there is no obstacle in the process of creating zào words.

The French, on the other hand, like to keep the French language pure, and their French-related institutions have a particularly high status in the French Academy of Sciences. So in the era of English hegemony, the French couldn't mix well, and almost no famous software originated in France. The Germans, who are not averse to English, have created SAP, a business software giant.

Some German multinationals even use English as the primary language of internal communication. When Wang traveled in Yunnan, he even met an 18-year-old German guy, who could come to the poor countryside of China to teach before going to university, teaching English, holding a tattered feature phone, less than 200 ¥, when Wang ate and chatted with him, he was very embarrassed, because he was using a genuine Apple mobile phone, but was invited by the young man.

Looking at the Germans' self-disciplined nature, it is no wonder that the German economy is unique in Europe.

All nations have their own pride, but in this era when English hegemony has been established, people have to think in that direction: countries that may bow their proud heads and embrace English hegemony can develop well. Singapore, the best developed of the Asian Tigers, is such a country that has thoroughly embraced the hegemony of the English language, and when more than 90% of its citizens are Chinese, Lee Kuan Yew brazenly established English as a Chinese, and this courage may be compared with Tsar Peter the Great, disguised as a craftsman, and went to the West to learn scriptures.

Lee Kuan Yew even made English the Chinese language of China. Seeing this scene in Lee Kuan Yew's biography, Wang Bang couldn't help but laugh out loud. If such a huge nation can really condescend, then this nation is terrible. If so, what is the business with Indians in the software industry?

It's a pity that Xiaoping studied in France, and if he studied in the United States and the United Kingdom, according to China's long-term use of Singapore as a teacher, it's really hard to say what will happen.

Lee Kuan Yew used market means to spend more than ten or twenty years to achieve an incredible thing, not to force the prohibition of speaking Chinese, but to use English in public schools and universities, and to set up filters on the social upward channel. At least he thinks it's a good fit for the whole huge country of China.

Despite not using such drastic measures, China is still relatively open, and China has the largest number of students studying in the United States in the world, and then South Korea, which has developed better among the four tigers. South Korean students are almost crazy, and such a small number of students studying in the United States can almost be compared to China.

According to Wu Xiaobo's statistics, after 97, one in ten Hong Kong people, most of the middle class emigrated, it is estimated that these are proficient in English, why not go to a foreign country? As for whether this is the main reason for Hong Kong's decline, everyone will figure it out for themselves.

Taiwanese people are not very open, and they must even find a corresponding word in the Chinese surname when translating foreign names, such as "Stalin", guess which buddy.

China's economic miracle owes a great deal to our "mouthful, physical, but honest" approach to foreign flattery. If you look closely, you will see that the logos of all domestic brands are in English without exception. Xiaomi,It will definitely be printed with the MI logo,Meizu almost changed the logo to"Meizu",But it still can't withstand the huge pressure of Meizu,It's still MEIZU。 Lenovo is always quietly printed with the Lonovo logo.

Not to mention VIVO and OPPO, they don't have any Chinese names at all, and they also use a lot of Korean entertainment star endorsements, deliberately making small town girls think that they are Korean brands.

When the brand Smartisan dares to print the two big Chinese characters "hammer" on its mobile phone, when we are spiritually free from the control of English hegemony. At least for now, the direct use of Chinese character logos is still a thing that we subconsciously think is low to burst.

In terms of artistic achievement, the beauty of writing "MUJI" directly far surpasses that of the monotonous MUJI, but unfortunately, Japanese brands cannot escape the hegemony of English, and this atmosphere has risen to the point of aesthetic hegemony.

After writing the script of this episode of the podcast, Wang Fang knew that he would never be popular, this is directly on the self-esteem of a nation, can you still be popular? If you can become popular by destroying the last bastion of national pride in your own audience, is there any reason for heaven?

But English hegemony has become a fait accompli, and who can change it? Anyway, the old king had no choice, he slept with a full melancholy, although his English was good, but it was not as good as a secondary school student of the American emperor. Although he knows what the essence of Chinese characters is, his blood and soul have been inseparably entangled with Chinese characters.

Tragic.

He now knows why Hawking always likes to bet with people, and the bets are always against his own theories, and he wants to lose. The old king also hoped that he was wrong.