Riding the wind of rebirth

"The main output is the national dialect phonetic database, which includes three major parts: initial consonant collection, final consonant collection, and tone collection. We have established a full range of Chinese phonetic system, and used computer technology to find the rules of sound grouping."

"There is a tendency in the academic community now, a bad tendency," Zhou Zhi said. "Although the Swedish sinologist Karlgren has been committed to the study of the ancient Chinese phonology since the 1940s, and it has gradually grown and developed to form a unique and grand research system, there are still many problems."

"The method introduced by Karlgren is unique, based on comparisons of ancient rhyme patterns, medieval rhyme books, and comparisons with other languages. The method generally used since then is to compare synchronic evidence such as the rhymes and homophones in the Book of Songs with Middle Chinese recorded in rhyme books such as Qieyun (601), but this is not conducive to phonological analysis. Supplementary evidence includes cognates and Min pronunciations in other Sino-Tibetan languages, early transliterations of foreign place names, and early loanwords from the neighboring Miao-Yao languages, the Tai branch, and the Tocharian language family."

"Although the symbols used by various phonograms are quite different and many details are still controversial, most of the newer phonograms have reached some agreement on core issues. At least in the 1970s, some consensus was reached, including that Old Chinese has fewer places of modulation than Middle Chinese, has voiceless sonorants, has labialized velar and labio-garyotic initials, and that the number of final consonants has changed from more to less."

"In recent years, most scholars agree that the six-vowel system and the reorganized liquid system. Early onomatopoeia mostly assumed voiced stop codas to explain the contact between entering-tone characters and other characters in rhyme, but many researchers now believe that Old Chinese lacked tones and that Middle Chinese tones arose from the loss of other consonants at the coda."

"After conducting a general survey, we found that we do not agree with this view."

"We won't talk about evidence that is not based on Old Chinese, after all, the main evidence for Old Chinese phonetics is the rhyme patterns of Middle Chinese, Chinese characters, and the Book of Songs from the 10th to 7th centuries BC in the 7th century. Other types of evidence are not very comprehensive, but they can be very valuable, such as Min dialect, early transliterations of place names, early loanwords from neighboring languages, cognates from related languages, and so on."

"But as far as the Book of Songs is concerned, the question of whether there are tones is not open to discussion. For example, if the tones of the Shishi Shishi lion are not distinguished in the case of monosyllabic Chinese characters, the meaning of the text cannot be expressed. This is a fundamental violation of the generation logic of Chinese phonetics."

"I think this situation is due to the influence of foreign researchers." Zhou Zhi began to talk about this: "Kalb Benhan, Wang Li, Pulleyblank, Li Fanggui, Bai Yiping, Yahontov, Zheng Zhangshangfang and Staroskin, they all made a mistake, or because of their lack of ability, they were more engaged in theoretical and methodological research."

"It's like a dish, such as twice-cooked pork. From the classics, we know that this dish is to first boil the pork until it can be pierced through with chopsticks, then take it out and cut it into thin slices, stir-fry it into a long slice, then add fermented black beans, bean paste, and green garlic sprouts, stir-fry evenly, add salt and MSG, and it's ready."

"But the problem is that no one knows what kind of meat Erdaorou is, nor do they know what fermented black beans and bean paste taste like. If Erdaorou is understood as a kind of beef or chicken, fermented black beans are understood as cooked beans, and bean paste is understood as mashed broad beans, then can the twice-cooked pork made according to the recipe still be called twice-cooked pork?"

"Starting from Karlgren, followed by Staroskin and Yahontov, their understanding of ancient phonology and the methodology they developed with such incomplete basic conditions are worthy of praise, but their work was just to refine the recipes. For example, they knew that fermented black beans were soaked in soy sauce, and that fermented broad beans were made with chili salt, but that was all." "They couldn't express the most authentic and direct taste of these things in words. Sound itself can't be expressed in words alone."

"And their academic translators and successors have gone even further, ignoring the biggest and most fundamental process in the humanities - field research."

"Then we discovered a very interesting phenomenon." Zhou Zhi smiled playfully: "Most of the medieval Chinese linguists are better at initial consonants, but they can't even accurately interpret the finals of some dialects that have survived to this day. Not to mention the finals, they can't even pronounce the entering tones."

"Their theoretical research may be very profound, but their reorganization and construction only remain on paper or in their minds. They cannot be read out in a direct way for everyone to know."

"This has led to many strange and bizarre readings that can no longer be described as specious; they are simply completely different."

"Both Gu and I believe that we still have to leave the study and return to the fields to find out the true appearance and taste of fermented black beans, bean paste, and two-cut pork, and then combine them with the theories of our predecessors. Only then can we finally get the most consistent pronunciation of the medieval and even ancient characters that are in line with the inferences and remains."

"First you have to get the ingredients, then you can get the reference recipe and start cooking. Our predecessors didn't have the good conditions and financial resources that we have now. They had no other choice but to stay in the house and make simulations under their cramped conditions."

“Just because they couldn’t do it before doesn’t mean we can’t do it now.”

"For example, before, people could only study the oldest collection of rhymed prose, the Book of Songs. The study of the rhyme groups of the Book of Songs began when Gu Yanwu divided it into 10 rhyme groups, which were later improved by Qing Dynasty philologists, resulting in a steady increase in the number of rhyme groups. For example, Duan Lao (Yucai) discovered that Chinese characters with the same phonetic component must belong to the same rhyme group, which means that almost all characters can be classified into a certain group. Finally, Wang Lao (Li) determined the number of rhyme groups in the Book of Songs to be in the s. Until the s, the rhyme groups summarized by Wang Lao were used in various reconstructions, until Zheng Zhangshangfang, Staroskin and Bai Yiping, who independently hypothesized a more radical division in the past few years, forming nearly rhyme groups."

"However, the pronunciation of these rhyme parts is ridiculous even when read by the scholars who summarized them, because these scholars grew up in an environment where these pronunciations did not exist at all, nor did they have multiple tones. Due to limited conditions, they did not have the opportunity to visit various parts of the country to experience the pronunciations of these rhyme parts in person. They could only 'take cake in the air' and construct them out of thin air based on the rules summarized from books in the absence of a huge amount of information." (End of this chapter)