Riding the wind of rebirth

Huang Ruishan may still have the idea of ​​getting a job and earning money as soon as possible to ease the burden on his family. For carefree girls like Li Yijia, their families may be hoping that she can make her academic qualifications more impressive so that she can find a better job in the future.

However, these are just Zhou Zhi's own thoughts. He hasn't had time to communicate with the two of them yet. It wouldn't be good if he revealed them too early and they were unwilling, or if it affected their work mood.

However, the two readily agreed. Li Yijia and Huang Ruishan already had experience in forum management and were quite adept at organizing electronic documents. Since there was too much material for Zhou Zhi to read, having the two extract summaries from the book would save Zhou Zhi a lot of trouble.

The only problem is that their levels of philology and phonology are not quite up to par for this kind of work; a semester of undergraduate courses is enough to cover the basics of phonology.
For example, Li Yijia once asked Zhou Zhi about the information on the character “波”. According to the collection results of the Kangxi Dictionary, this character is pronounced as “博禾” in the Tang Rhyme Dictionary, so it should be “be”. Zhou Zhi had to tell her that first of all, “禾” was not pronounced as “he” in ancient times, but as “ho”. Therefore, the fanqie of “博禾” should actually be “bo”, which is consistent with the modern pronunciation of “波”.

In addition, there is "逋禾切" in Zheng Yun, where 逋 is not pronounced "bu" but "pu". Therefore, "逋禾切" corresponds to "po", which is also the pronunciation of the character "波" in Tang Yun.

Similarly, the Zheng Yun dictionary also records a "逋眉切", which should be pronounced "pei" here.

This phonetic notation is also included in the "Jiyun" dictionary, corresponding to "banmiqie" and "biyiqie" respectively.

If we interpret “班糜切” and “彼义切” according to the pronunciation in modern Chinese, they are both “bi”. However, because “糜” was pronounced “mei” in ancient times, “班糜切” corresponds to “pei”. This is consistent with “逋眉切” recorded in Zheng Yun. Only “彼义切” corresponds to “bi”.

This knowledge actually exceeds the requirements of undergraduate Chinese literature majors in phonology. In other words, Zhou Zhi is essentially training Li Yijia and Huang Ruishan to the standards of graduate students. Only by reaching this standard and working on projects with him can they keep up.

If these things were to be learned in a classroom by lecturing on chapters, it would undoubtedly be extremely boring. Even many teachers themselves don't quite understand them, so the teaching effect would be predictable.

These teachers also have their methods, which is to "teach by rote," teaching and testing according to the textbook, mainly aiming to make students "swallow it whole," purely testing their memorization skills. At the end of the semester, they will highlight the key points, which is enough to test their learning attitude, and that is considered to have achieved their goal.

However, the results were predictable.

Now it's different. Now it's combined with research projects, and this obstacle was already overcome more than a year ago when Zhouzhi taught everyone to master the rhymes by learning Cantonese. Now, doing more detailed research is actually quite interesting to Huang Ruishan and Li Yijia.

For example, the poem "Mountain Journey" that caused a great stir in later generations, with everyone debating whether "斜" should be pronounced "xie" or "xia", actually both pronunciations are wrong.

In Du Mu's time, according to the Tang Rhyme Dictionary, "斜" itself was pronounced "似嗟切", while the Rhyme Dictionary and the Zheng Rhyme Dictionary pronounced it "徐嗟切". There were also "余遮切", "于遮切", "时遮切", and "直加切".

At that time, “嗟” was pronounced as jia and “徐” as sui, so “似嗟切”, “时遮切” and “徐嗟切” are the same sound, and “斜” is pronounced as “sia” here.

"余遮切" and "于遮切" are pronounced "ya".

There is also a relatively rare pronunciation called "直加切", because "加" was pronounced "ga" in ancient times, so here it is pronounced "za".

Therefore, in ancient times, the three pronunciations of "斜" were "sia", "ya", and "za".

The first pronunciation is the standard pronunciation when indicating inclination. The second pronunciation is used in a more special way, such as in the famous "褒斜道", which should be pronounced as "ya".

The third pronunciation is not recorded in the Kangxi Dictionary; only the pronunciation is recorded. It is estimated to be a very rare usage.

Therefore, the correct pronunciation of "远上寒山石径斜" is sia. As for "白云深处有人家" in "家", the character "家" is pronounced "gu ya qie" in the Tang Rhyme Dictionary and "ju ya qie" in the Rhyme Dictionary and the Zheng Rhyme Dictionary. Since "居" was pronounced "gui" in ancient times, "gu ya qie" and "ju ya qie" are actually the same sound and should be pronounced "ga".

The word "flower" in the last sentence should have been pronounced "fa" at that time.

Therefore, when "Mountain Journey" is read using the Tang Rhyme Dictionary, although the pronunciation of the three rhyming words differs from that in modern Chinese, it still rhymes.

Compared to online discussions in later generations, this knowledge is somewhat advanced, but for Zhouzhi's current research, it can only be considered basic. Fortunately, it is quite interesting when combined with the project, and Zhouzhi can answer any questions at any time. Therefore, Huang Ruishan and Li Yijia's phonology level is making rapid progress without them realizing it, in the research that they find "quite interesting".

Their rapid progress made Zhou Zhi's work easier, allowing him to dedicate more time to software development.

The first step is simple: to comprehensively organize the phonetic records in ancient books.

This work was a key cultural project during the heyday of any dynasty, and the most recent and meticulous compilation of it is the Kangxi Dictionary.

The Kangxi Dictionary collects both the pronunciation and the meaning of characters. The pronunciations are mainly from classics such as Tang Yun, Ji Yun, Yun Hui, and Zheng Yun, while the meanings are from monographs such as Shuo Wen and Yu Pian.

This undoubtedly saved the research a lot of time.

However, the Kangxi Dictionary only collected a portion of the information; it was not comprehensive, and it only collected information without organizing it.

For example, the Kangxi Dictionary collected the character “斜” as “似嗟切”.

Then look up “嗟”, which is “咨邪切” in the Kangxi Dictionary.

Following this clue, we further investigated the character “邪”. In the Kangxi Dictionary, it is listed as “似嗟切” and also as “徐嗟切”, with a special note stating that the character is pronounced “斜”.

After this round of investigation, an interesting phenomenon will be found: the sounds and rhymes of characters in the Kangxi Dictionary seem to form a series of circular "self-evident vortexes".

Similarly, these vortexes can extend to the rest of the rhyme books.

In this way, each character actually has many other characters to prove its pronunciation, and each character can also serve as a clue to the pronunciation of other characters.

This brings us back to the concept of logic: preconditions and reasoning methods form the dual basis for revealing truth. The more sufficient the preconditions, the more scientific the conclusion will be under the same reasoning method.

Did the elders in Zhouzhi know this method? Of course they did, but even knowing it wouldn't have helped, because there are countless books recording rhythms from ancient times to the present. If you had to search through all of them from the classics, memorize them by memory and notes, and also sort out the relationships between them, one person might not be able to do even a tenth of it in a lifetime.

But now that this problem is in Zhou Zhi's hands, it is no longer a problem.

Because the information age has arrived. (End of Chapter)