However, rather than dwelling on linguistic unification, Jeanne Jr. soon became more interested in technical details.

"I kind of see what you mean. However, if you promote Chinese characters as a common script, how can you connect with the local language? She asked, "There are many local languages here, and there are differences in vocabulary and grammar between them, how do you unify them?" ”

"We don't call it a common script." Guo Kang told her: "To be precise, Chinese characters should be called 'war characters'. It is tied to the military and is not a legal lingua franca. It's just that our civic system is closely related to the military, so it seems to have a great influence. ”

"Isn't that the same...... "Jeanne muttered.

"It looks like the result is the same, but when it comes to the actual implementation, the difference is huge." Guo Kang shook his head and explained: "It is of course very difficult to forcibly promote a script that has no foundation or even has nothing to do with the local language, and it is almost impossible to succeed. No matter how strong our strength is, we can't even count that little bit of people, not even a tribe, and we definitely can't do it. ”

"My ancestor Shangyuan Tinggong had just arrived in the fiefdom of Bulgaria and found that he couldn't understand what people were saying. Not only did he not understand it, but neither did the Great Khan of Boyan Timur, nor did the envoys of the Golden Horde who came with them, and even the officials sent by the puppet tsar of Bulgaria to help with the contact could not understand the local 'Bulgarian dialect'. He introduced Guo Gai's original deeds:

"But there's too few people who can translate – or that kind of place, there's no one who can translate into Chinese and Turkish, and you have to translate double or even triple to have a conversation with ordinary people. Obviously, this mode of exchange cannot be sustained for long. ”

"Therefore, the lords who were appointed before this place have also been unstable. Because as outsiders, they can't even pass the language barrier. Nominally, he was appointed by the Great Khan to administer the region, but in reality he could only occasionally give some simple instructions to the local magnates. These heroes have long been accustomed to both ends of the first rat, and they know that even if the Golden Horde fights every time, they will not stay long, as long as they pay money to deal with it, and in daily management, they will not take them seriously at all. ”

"If it is an ordinary lord, it is generally necessary to maintain this local order by relying on the personal soldiers brought by himself, until the personal soldiers can no longer defeat the powerful forces, or the income from maintaining the rule can no longer make up for the expenses. Being able to converse with a few of the local snakes in Greek, Bulgarian, and even Kipchak and urging them to pay their taxes on time is already a very conscientious administrator. Ordinary people don't have the ability or the mood to talk to ordinary natives. ”

"But Yuan Tinggong is a person with great ambitions, and he feels that doing this is tantamount to being an ornament. Therefore, he hoped to at least bypass the local nobles and heroes, and directly recruit a group of residents to settle in his own farm. Otherwise, if you don't even have a foundation, what can you do in the future? ”

Fortunately, he learned things relatively quickly, and soon learned some local dialects, so he personally organized the people. They were also asked to teach them how to farm and build water conservancy. In his spare time, he also took people to learn boxing and practice martial arts, and taught his own exercises. ”

At that time, he didn't really have any idea of popularizing the language, it was nothing more than that he couldn't learn the local dialect at home, and sometimes he couldn't help but mix some Chinese. Locals soon discovered that by learning simple Chinese, they could get close to him and learn various skills more easily. Therefore, many people came here, and he even made guesses and taught people like this. ”

"The local Haoqiang is very sensitive to this and has come to provoke many times. But Yuan Ting Gong was also a chivalrous traveler back then. In a conflict of this scale, in fact, a few family thugs decide the winner. He dealt with the people in a few clicks, and the remaining guards, bandits, and the like would disperse in a hurry. ”

"The so-called universal lingua franca is actually what it is."

"But aren't you talking about organizing agricultural production in ordinary times?" Princess Jeanne asked.

"It's all the same thing." Guo Kang didn't even feel the need to explain: "It's almost the same in every industry." If you can organize farming, basically everything else can be organized. It's the same system anyway. ”

"But in war, the need for a unified language is not very great. Gather people from the same place, and have an officer who can understand orders. Princess Jeanne said, "As for farming, the requirements are even lower." On weekdays, as long as I work in a fixed field, at most I am in the village, and I don't have the opportunity to communicate with people who speak other languages. ”

"We weren't like that." Guo Kang shook his head: "Don't say anything else, you have to repair water conservancy." Can the people of a village repair the river control project? ”

"Huh?" Princess Jeanne didn't seem to have thought about the river. She thought about it again before she said, "There should be professional engineers doing these jobs." Wouldn't it be nice to let them design it and then subcontract it to people in different parts of the world to build it? As long as the contractor can understand the design and understand the engineer's explanation, it should be fine. ”

Guo Kang listened and shook his head.

"I don't know what level of work you are talking about, but the project we needed to carry out at that time should be more demanding than that." He shook his head and said: "According to the Li family's legend, although it was later nominally called 'writing for military purposes', what they originally thought about was actually mainly engineering problems. ”

"We're too scattered, it's a nest of homeless people after all. From the Greeks to the Kipchaks, there was everything. If you still divide the teams one by one, you won't be able to command. Moreover, their engineering, for delicate operations, may be even higher than in war. After all, at that time, most of the troops on this side knew that it was enough to advance according to the order. And the construction requirements are much more elaborate than this. ”

"As for outsourcing, I can't find anyone either. Because the Li brothers themselves are the best water conservancy contractors in the area. They can't find anyone else either......"

Princess Jeanne probably really didn't expect that this kind of agricultural engineering would be higher than the technical requirements of war, and she was speechless for a while.

"These common words that we later developed were used when they were designing and guiding everyone to build water conservancy according to the plan." Guo Kang told her: "The locals are basically illiterate, and there is no difference between recognizing Chinese characters and Greek, and Chinese characters are more convenient." ”

"Why is that?" Princess Jeanne asked.

"Just use those Chinese characters as ideograms. For them, words like 'long', 'high', and 'square' are much easier to remember than a string of Greek ciphers. Guo Kang can be sure of this: "Compared with coding, graphics have much more information content. So there are definitely advantages. ”

"It's kind of an 'engineering language'. Later, we took advantage of these characteristics and applied them to the military, which was also a good thing. ”

(End of chapter)