Mrs. Larry picked up a twig and began to write and draw on the ground. She first wrote down some strange symbols, like a kind of text, which no one could understand. She writes very carefully, scribbling and revising as she writes, as if a schoolboy is writing words silently.

The soft clay floor was soon covered with a dense patch, and Mrs. Larry paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead, and read it carefully before she said, "There should be no mistake, this is all I saw in the altar." ”

"It's a bit like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. ”

"It's kind of like that." "I first saw similar symbols on the scepter of the Savage Patriarch and some of the pottery in his house, and I thought of the relationship between our mission to the South Taiping and the Egyptian pyramids, which I thought was a variant of the ancient Egyptian script. But because the sample is too small, it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. Until I saw these at the altar—

I can be sure that this is a very old script, different from the ancient Egyptian priestly script, but it must have a relationship with each other. Before Champollion deciphered the Rosetta tablet, ancient Egyptian script had been regarded as a simple hieroglyph, but we all know by now that it has more phonetic parts than pictograms, so it is actually a phonetic-based script, which has both some pictographic and ideographic functions.

Phonetic scripts are characterized by their ease of transmission and not of recording. Ideograms, on the other hand, can be accurately and deeply expressed with a smaller number of words, but it also increases the difficulty of mastering them, so it is not conducive to widespread dissemination among different classes and races.

But almost all the world's writing began with pictograms, and then combined with the local spoken language to form phonetic writing. In the process of transmission, the ideographic part of the text will gradually be lost, leaving its phonetic function, and evolving into different combinations of pronunciation and symbols in various places.

Except for China, which has entered a highly developed agrarian civilization from a very early stage, and has maintained a unified dynasty for thousands of years without fundamental division of home and country and civilization interruption, and has been able to retain the complex writing system of Chinese characters, which has become the only ancient script used today, whether it is the sacred script of ancient Egypt, the cuneiform script of Sumer, or the Mayan script, it has died out. And even if they existed, from what we have deciphered, they have long since evolved into a phonetic-based script.

Linguistics has been looking for evidence of the evolution of the Egyptian script, and we suspect that before it, there should have been a richer hieroglyphic and ideographic script similar to the Chinese character system, which gradually evolved into the later script. ”

"Could that be the evolution of Chinese characters?" Petru interjected. He knew a little Chinese and agreed that Mrs. Larry's Chinese characters were the most complex in the world.

"No, it won't." As Lady Larry's assistant, Alice also had considerable research in philology, "There is no correlation between Chinese characters and sacred scripts, they are completely different in their structure and way of meaning, and Chinese characters are much more complex and ingenious than sacred scripts." We should be glad that Chinese civilization has not been cut off, otherwise Chinese characters would be more difficult to decipher than any code in the world. ”

"Isn't there a Chinese proverb that says, 'Truth is always the simplest thing'? Why are Chinese characters so complicated? The heart of a person who uses such a complex thing must be very complicated! Petru glanced at Aoki and Su Huilan, "If only they were as good as English, simple, easy to learn, and practical!" ”

"That's what you think is simple, but Chinese don't necessarily think so!" Alice retorted, "If it weren't for the fact that Western civilization has dominated the world since the Industrial Revolution, maybe we would all be speaking Chinese now!" ”

Petru shrugged noncommittally: "Fortunately this is not the case, otherwise I would have been illiterate." ”

Mrs. Larry shook her head and said, "The advantages of Chinese characters are clear, they are very ideographic, they are more flexible, and they can express richer meanings in fewer words than English and other languages." Crucially, the ability of Chinese characters to form words is much stronger than that of English, when human beings know more and more things, in the face of new things, the performance of English is dwarfed, adding roots will make words longer and longer, and creating new words will make our dictionary thicker and thicker. However, Chinese characters can easily create new nouns and even new adjective usages through their rich ideographic functions and flexible word formation capabilities. So far, the number of English words has exceeded 700,000, and the vocabulary of Arabic has reached an astonishing 10 million, while Chinese characters have been used for thousands of years, and there are only more than 100,000 words in common use. ”

When the crow heard this, he cried out, "Quack! I can say a lot of kanji quack! Then he led the neck and sang, "The whole world is learning from China...... Confucius's quack is becoming more and more international...... ......Bench Bench

The Chinese song sung by the crow, coupled with the peculiar pronunciation, made Petru a little irritated when he heard it: "Okay, okay, when I get out of here, I'll go to China to learn Chinese, and the whole world will fucking speak Chinese!" ”

Mrs. Larry laughed:

"The disadvantages of kanji are also obvious, like you said – hard to learn!

All people are born to speak, and it is not difficult to go from babbling to proficient conversation, and you don't even need to go to school to do it. But being able to speak does not mean that you have mastered a language, and the process of civilization needs the help of language and writing. For children in English-speaking countries, after learning to speak, and then learning 26 letters, they have basically mastered the language, can read newspapers, can write emails, and can tweet.

However, Chinese children must study systematically in order to truly master the Chinese language. Modern people may not find it that difficult, but if you imagine the living conditions in ancient times and the size of China, you can see how difficult it is to promote the language.

Language is a part of civilization, a sign of the maturity of civilization, and a catalyst for the development of civilization. To a certain extent, the prosperity of the Mediterranean civilization and European civilization is inseparable from the contribution of Latin, and the uniqueness of Chinese civilization is indelible due to Chinese characters. But in terms of transmissibility, Indo-European languages have a natural advantage. It can be easily accepted by people of different regions and races, without the need for a unified central dynasty to promote and implement its civilizational mission and values.

So what Alice just said is not entirely right, it is not civilization that dominates language, but language that advances civilization, and even determines the mode of civilization to a certain extent. In terms of the efficiency of language communication and application in modern society and the development of globalization, English, which is derived from Latin and Germanic languages, has the greatest advantages, so it will become the most common language in the world. ”

Petru asked puzzledly: "You say that Chinese is the most advanced language in the world, and then you say that English is the best language today, so what should you do?" Why don't the fools at the United Nations unify the language of the world? ”

"The process of human civilization is complex, it is not one-way linear, it is not even going forward or upward, and different languages will show different vitality at different stages of civilization," said Mrs. Larry. The most suitable language today is English, and perhaps in a few decades, the universal language of the world will become Chinese or something else. ”

"Oh, well, I understand, but what does it have to do with where we are now? What do these paintings on the ground indicate? Petru asked.