Riding the wind of rebirth

Therefore, these dialect proverbs become indirect proof that Xu Shen's "Shuowen Jiezi" says these characters are all "from the sound of 'gong'".

So what was the pronunciation like back then? We have to work backward step by step. Before going back to the Han Dynasty, we need to clarify the pronunciations of the Ming, Song, and Tang Dynasties.

This requires combining the information with the Hongwu Zhengyun, Guangyun, Jiyun, Tangyun, and Qieyun dictionaries to find evidence.

For example, the final of "一东" in the Pingshui Rhyme Dictionary is the same as the nasal sound "ong" in Mandarin, while the final of "二冬" is actually similar to "o" + "ong". This pronunciation is widely preserved in Wu dialect, Minnan dialect, Hakka dialect and Cantonese. Therefore, "一东" and "二冬" are very easy to distinguish in dialects.

Each rhyme group contains more than one character, so the pronunciations of these characters can corroborate each other. Combined with samples from various local dialects, it is relatively convenient and scientific to deduce the ancient pronunciations of these characters.

Of course, if this problem were that simple, it wouldn't be worthy of being a doctoral topic; there are many issues involved.

One of the major problems is that rhyme books themselves are out of touch with the times.

Just like "Dream of the Red Chamber," most illustrated versions use clothing and appearances from the Ming Dynasty and are set in the Ming Dynasty. However, it can be seen from the text that Cao Xueqin based his work on the society of the Qing Dynasty.

The same applies to "Water Margin". It is about the Song Dynasty, but it actually references a lot of the social structure of the Ming Dynasty.

The story of "Journey to the West" is even funnier. Tang Sanzang and his disciples traveled thousands of miles, seeking lodging and begging for alms from kings, and they ate Chinese food everywhere they went.

Rhyme books were collected and compiled by scholars. One of their important purposes in collecting and compiling rhyme books was to compose poems and essays and create rhymed prose.

In ancient Chinese literary creation, "following the ancients" is a very common phenomenon, and this habit is still the case today. If a high school student can use classical Chinese style, or oracle bone script or seal script for the college entrance examination essay, regardless of the writing level, the news will definitely cause a national sensation.

Because of this habit, the authors of rhyme books throughout history have preferred to focus on verifying and summarizing the rules of phonology from previous generations, while neglecting the phonology of their own dynasty.

Studying the sounds and rhymes of previous generations is considered an "elegant pursuit," while studying contemporary sounds and melodies is considered vulgar. It's like how people who work in classical music generally consider it refined, while those who sing pop music are inherently considered inferior to those who sing opera. That's roughly the idea.

This creates many questions for later generations in clarifying which rhyme categories are characteristics of their time and which are patterns from previous generations.

For example, the nursery rhymes, proverbs, jingles, Buddhist verses, and seasonal songs in ancient people's notes mostly followed the "rhyme scheme of the time," while the poems and prose of the literati at that time mostly followed the ancient rhyme scheme.

If we don't look at it dialectically, we will undoubtedly fall into logical confusion.

Another point to consider is the difference between ancient "dialects" and "Mandarin".

Records from the Ming Dynasty mention instances where emperors suffered greatly from not being able to understand the difficult-to-understand Fujianese and Cantonese spoken by officials during audiences.

Therefore, the nursery rhymes, proverbs, and jingles in ancient people's notes, Buddhist verses, seasonal tunes, and even some literary works that deliberately use dialectal flavor, such as bamboo branch poems, all have regional distribution factors in their rhythm. We cannot simply apply "official language" or "standard rhymes" to them, otherwise we will fall into logical confusion. Having considered all of this, there is another very important point: don't be led astray by your predecessors.

Many of the predecessors who left behind writings were great scholars, but even great scholars are not necessarily right in all their views, especially in Chinese literature and traditional Chinese studies. A single point can affect a whole range of issues, and no one dares to say that they can completely research every point and every aspect.

To give just one example, in the 1920s, a wave of skepticism towards antiquity arose among historical research experts, giving rise to the "Ancient History Criticism School." They raised serious questions about the lineage chart of Shang kings recorded in Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian."

The representative figure of the Ancient History Criticism School was Gu Jiegang. In his 1923 essay "On Ancient History Books with Mr. Qian Xuantong", he proposed to write a paper entitled "The Layered Construction of Ancient Chinese History", formally challenging the previous writing of ancient history.

In that letter about the evolution of ancient history, Gu Jiegang pointed out three issues: First, the later the era, the longer the legendary period of ancient history; second, the later the era, the more exaggerated the central figures in the legends; and third, even if we cannot know the true situation of a certain event, we can know the earliest situation of that event in the legends.

Gu Jiegang believed this was unreasonable and questionable, and under the influence of this trend of thought, the ancient Chinese historical system faced an unprecedented and severe challenge.

Hu Shi, another leading figure in the New Culture Movement, suggested in a letter to Gu Jiegang: "Let's shorten ancient history by two or three thousand years, starting with the Book of Songs. In the future, when epigraphy and archaeology are on a scientific track, we can use the historical materials unearthed from underground to slowly lengthen the ancient history before the Eastern Zhou Dynasty."

As a result, China's reliable history has been shortened to more than 2,500 years.

Who was Gu Jiegang? He was a renowned historian and folklorist, a pioneer and founder of modern historical geography and folklore. Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, he was a professor and head of the history department at Yenching University, a researcher at the Beiping Research Institute, a corresponding researcher and academician at the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, editor-in-chief of the journal *Wen Shi*, and director and general manager of the Great China Book Bureau. After the founding of the PRC, he was a researcher and academic committee member at the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a council member of the Chinese Historical Society, and a member of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles.

He devoted himself to the study of ancient history and the collation of ancient books for a long time, and was responsible for collating and annotating the Zizhi Tongjian and the Twenty-Four Histories, making important contributions. His major works include Gushi Bian, Handai Xuexue Shi Lue, Lianghan Zhouzhi Kao, and Zheng Qiao Zhuan. He also co-authored Sanhuang Kao, Zhongguo Zhangjie Yange Shi, and Zhongguo Shiji Modi, making great contributions to Chinese literature and history.

Such a person, capable of raising questioning viewpoints, must have those that are rigorous, thorough, and able to withstand scrutiny.

At least in the academic circles at that time, there were virtually no scholars who could distinguish him from the old man.

However, these analyses and understandings are all based on the historical materials, records, and rigorous logical reasoning of the time. As we all know, the later results were astonishing: a piece of oracle bone was unearthed, along with an underground artifact containing a lineage chart of Shang kings, which greatly enriched the evidence for historical and literary research and even overturned the academic community's doubts about the lineage of Shang kings in the Records of the Grand Historian.

This is also an important difference between humanities and sciences. Both humanities and sciences research emphasize logic, but logic is divided into two parts: premises and inferences.

The difference between arts and sciences is that sciences, to a considerable extent, have perfect and comprehensive logical premises. For example, mathematics is based on the premise that 1 plus 1 equals 2, and all other formulas are extensions of this premise.

For example, Euclidean plane geometry is actually derived from the three established premises of the line axiom, the circle axiom, and the angle axiom.

This premise is only broken when you jump from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional plane; otherwise, it is complete.

The most distinctive feature of the humanities is the incompleteness of logical premises. Different premises, even when using the same reasoning, can lead to different, and sometimes even contradictory, conclusions. (End of Chapter)