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AuthorJun (jinsanliang)

In forums like Longkong, where there is a strong atmosphere of refuting rumors, there are still many people who keep repeating their own or other people's views on the Chinese language. I think it's time to do a sort out and try to get everyone to avoid these rumors.

There used to be a masterpiece of @殇天Burning Sword Brother - Traveling through the Ancient Chinese Language Handbook (first draft 1. 01 version), but it's just the beginning.

In the study of the Chinese language, it is more difficult to say what is what, but it is easier to say what is not what is not.

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The update speed is fast, and you can find this site by Baidu search. In order to think of the convenience of writing where to write, this article is in the form of a question and answer. As for how the ancients spoke, if you want to get a glimpse, jump straight to the dividing line.

(Anyone who doesn't look up is the answer.) ）

Question: XX dialect is not authentic Chinese, only our XX dialect is the ancient Chinese language. Right?

This should be the most widely poisoned, and the targets are mainly Mandarin or Mandarin.

When it comes to this, the first thing to examine is the division of modern Chinese dialects.

Something like this:

Official dialect (the northern dialect, the largest number of speakers of this dialect, accounting for more than 70%), including the Northeast-Beijing official dialect, Jilu official dialect, Central Plains official dialect, Jiaoliao official dialect, Lanyin official dialect, Southwest official dialect, Jianghuai official dialect;

Jin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan, Xiang, Wu, Min.

(Digression: Why did I list the subcategories of official dialects?) Because in terms of the number of people, after being divided into sub-categories, they are about the same as those of other major categories. ）

The next level of relationship is Mandarin-Jin, Cantonese-Hakka-Gan, Wu-Xiang, Min;

Among them, the relationship between Mandarin and Cantonese is the closest, followed by Wu and Min again.

All dialects are the circulation of Chinese, and there are no non-Chinese, which needs to be affirmed first.

Therefore, all the dialects are in Chinese, and they are all pro-sons, and there is no godson, but the family is separated sooner or later.

So, who is authentic in a large language that includes multiple dialects?

This authenticity is not distinguished from the hybrid, but from the tributaries.

Traditionally, these two judgments have been commonly used:

The common body (those that can understand each other) has the largest number of users; It is most frequently used as an administrative, literary, and religious language; (Digression: the more people, the more reasonable, this is simple democracy!) ）

Instead of using the following judgments:

the most ancient; the least affected by external shocks; recognized by foreigners; It is operated by the purest of blood.

Generally speaking, the standard language and the written language have a complementary relationship, if there is a lot of artificiality, the written language is the main one; If there are fewer artificial components, the intersection of dialects in the common body is chosen.

Judging from this criterion, it is natural for the standard language of Chinese to choose the official dialect.

As for the type of pronunciation used in the standard language, that is, the standard tone, the regularity of this choice is not strong, and the political center or cultural center is generally used. At this stage, the Chinese language is spoken in Beijing, the administrative center.

In fact, there is a certain reason for adopting the language of the political and cultural center. Because the language communication here is the most active, the most convenient to disseminate, and the simplest form of speech.

Q: xx is a mongrel. This shouldn't be right.

Classic example: Mandarin with Manchu and Mongolian languages; Cantonese is a Malay dialect; Wait a minute.

As I said before, the dialects are all Chinese, there are no mongrels, at most there are some bottoms.

Q: The warped tongue sound is not an inherent component of the Chinese language.

The warped tongue sound is a serious Chinese component.

When we say whether a speech is an intrinsic component of a language, the key is whether it can distinguish between the inherent sound classes, not whether the form of the speech is new.

For example, the distinction between flat tongue and warped tongue sounds, the words received by these two types of sounds were also distinguished in ancient times, that is, the words that are different in these two categories are also different in ancient times.

Therefore, even if you do not consider whether the tongue sound was not available in ancient times, this tongue sound is also an inherent component of the Chinese language.

For example, Wu and Min have a large number of nasalized vowels, which are not found in other dialects, and obviously this phonetic form is new, but it is still necessary to say that these are the inherent components of the Chinese language, because they are used to distinguish the inherent sound classes; For example, the "acid" in Hokkien can be pronounced as su, and this nasalization is the difference used in other dialects to distinguish sua from suan.

Spoken pronunciation always tends to be simplified, and often different sound classes become the same, i.e. phonemes merge. However, due to the clarity of communication needs, spoken language often produces new forms of speech to maintain the distinction between different sound classes, that is, to produce new phonemes.

This form of innovation is found in many dialects. In Cantonese, the pronunciation i/u/y (i.e., pinyin ü) disappeared, and in order to maintain this distinction between the inherent sound classes, a series of changes have taken place in Cantonese, such as the distinction between long and short vowels and a series of new vowels. For example, there is a set of a:n-i:n-y:n corresponding to an-ian-uan in the official dialect (there are other corresponding forms, not described). Another example is the aforementioned nasalized vowels.

Question: Is the disappearance of the sharp group sound distinction in some official dialects influenced by the Manchu language?

This is wishful thinking, in fact, the Jiantuan sound Manchu language is differentiated.

In fact, it is the Manchu language that is influenced by the name of this distinction called the sharp group sound: in Manchu, the letters representing the acute initial s are sharp, and the letters representing the initial h are arced.

Even now the Manchu language still has a sharp sound, you can listen to the news of Qapqar Xibe Autonomous County (Xibe is a dialect of the Manchu language).

The disappearance of this distinction is a normal phenomenon of the aforementioned simplification of spoken language. It's the same as the disappearance of the flat and n/l distinctions in many dialects.

Question: Isn't the disappearance of the official language influenced by the Mongolian language?

Ditto, in fact, the consonant rhyme end (that is, into the voice) Mongolian language also has.

Some people believe that judging from the matching of Shao Yong's Huangji Jingshi and Yin sound (that is, no rhyme tail), the Song Dynasty began to disappear. Moreover, in the rhyme, the mixing of different rhymes is also a manifestation of the disappearance of the voice.

What's more, this distinction between the sounds in the official dialect still exists in another form, such as the Yangping character of the Quanqing initials (that is, the initials are the words of the second tone of b/d/g/j/zh/z, such as "da", "pull" and "white") except for a few new words are ancient phonetic words, and the words with the finals are üe are all phonetic words.

According to the above, from this point of view, the sound of official dialect has not completely disappeared.

Question: Should the words of the ancients be the same as the words of xx?

For example, Shaanxi dialect and Henan dialect are one category; Cantonese, Hokkien, this is another category.

The former is the belief that languages have not changed much over the millennia, which is patently false. Judging from the phonetics of those languages that use phonetic scripts, 300 years is enough to change dramatically, and 500 years is enough to create a new language. The Chinese language is no exception. And people in the same region do not necessarily have a relationship of inheritance. This can also be changed, so the people who speak ancient dialects may not still be the majority of the local population, such as Yiguan Nandu, Huguang filling Sichuan, Jiangxi filling Huguang, breaking through the Guandong, going to the west, etc., all of which have greatly changed the local language ecology.

The latter group also believes that language has not changed much over the millennia, but is just another form of expression. Since the language of the people who stayed there can change, so can the language of the migratory people. This brings us to another issue. That is, migrants are not necessarily the majority in their new place of residence, so their spoken language is subject to the impact of the locals. For example, a Northeast person has been in Sichuan for ten years, and often his accent becomes neither completely Northeast nor completely Sichuan. For example, most of the words in Cantonese that we don't know next to the spoken words come from the bottom of the local Dongtai language.

Question: How did the ancient people speak, we can't know the Tao?

Surely the precise ones can't know the way. But probably there is. How the ancient people exported, that is, phonetically, we examine it from rhyme books, rhymes, and poems, supplemented by the general changes in language and the comparison of the languages of relatives, but it is only a simulated test, it can only be about the same, and it cannot be said that it is.

However, we can know the ancient form of language, that is, how the ancient people thought, that is, the vocabulary and grammar remained. They are still alive in books. That is to say, judging from the sentences alone, we know what the ancient people of the Tao said.

These books are generally not classics. As we all know, the classics were circulated in the form of the Qin and Han dynasties, that is, the form of the literary language.

(Digression: If you want to learn classical Chinese, the classic samples are Early Mengzhuang, Zhongshi Ji, and Late Hanliu.) These are relatively clear and fluent, and basically do not use the vocabulary of Shang Zhou. A textbook example, "Dreaming ominously at night and opening the door is auspicious", "Sleeping Bandit Zhen Pai Min Hongxiu", the latter is the vocabulary of Shang and Zhou. ）

Yuefu, folk songs, quotations, and idle books generally use a colloquial style, that is, people at that time spoke like that.

From the following changes in spoken language, it can be seen that in fact, the ancient common language and the contemporary common language (i.e., official language) are in the same line.

Q: When I see "Mom and Dad", I don't think it's like the ancient saying, but Mom and Dad are.

In fact, parents are the saying from ancient times to the present.

As mentioned earlier, speech is constantly changing, and generally speaking, the sound class changes as a whole, that is, the same type of sound will change the same. However, some words are very commonly used, and the changes make people feel uncomfortable, so there is no change, and the original pronunciation is generally maintained.

The ancient pronunciation of "parents" is roughly the same as "parents", but after all, the vast majority of people in ancient times were illiterate. Literate people feel that "parents" have changed from ba/ma to fu/mu, so what about ba/ma? The newly coined word "Mom and Dad" corresponds to this pronunciation.

Of course, there are also pronunciations that do not have newly coined words, which gives rise to different pronunciations.

For example, "A", similar words have been changed to e/uo rhyme, which is why "Amitabha" should be pronounced as emituo or womituo, and in fact it corresponds to amita;

The same "he/she/it" (these three ancient are one word) too.

Maybe this kind of character is written as a new character, which feels inappropriate. But in fact, "Mom and Dad" existed in the rhyme books of the Tang Dynasty.