Riding the wind of rebirth

Fortunately, the works left by these individuals are quite "modern." Wang Li was the founder of the modern Chinese phonetics system and the proposer of the "four tones and eight modes" theory. Luo Changpei combined traditional and modern methods to propose the "sound-meaning combination," which promoted phonetics and dialect surveys. Zhao Yuanren proposed the "five-degree phonetic notation method" and conducted a detailed "Hubei Dialect Survey." Zhang Shilu directly applied Western linguistic theories to conduct pioneering research, combining traditional phonology with modern science, and wrote "A History of Chinese Phonology" and "An Outline of Chinese Phonology."

In reconstructing the academic theories of these individuals using the most extensive dialectal phonetic specimens and information technology, the group of scholars quickly discovered some inconsistencies with their conclusions.

Such "violations" are mainly manifested in two aspects. First, the collection of initials and finals is insufficient, resulting in that no matter which phonetic symbol is invented, it is not enough to encompass all the initials and finals of the dialects. Second, the "granularity" of the tones is not "delicate". Taking Zhao Yuanren's five-degree marking method as an example, its first rule is that when describing a tone, only the outline of the tone is recorded, and only five pitches are recorded for the tone, which are roughly corresponding to the five tones: high level, rising, falling, departing, and entering.

However, this approach is clearly insufficient. Taking Cantonese as an example, the level, rising, and departing tones are further divided into yin and yang tones, corresponding to voiceless and voiced initials from ancient times. The entering tone is also divided into three: the middle entering tone, corresponding to long vowels; the yin entering tone, corresponding to short vowels; and the yang entering tone, corresponding to standard Mandarin. Using Zhao Yuanren's method, which doesn't focus on describing the intermediate changes, inevitably overlooks some information about the changes in the length of sounds.

These are precisely the parts that are most prone to corruption and simplification in the process of converting from Middle Chinese to modern Chinese. In other words, they are the differences between Middle Chinese and modern Chinese. Therefore, Zhao Yuanren's method is more suitable for marking modern pronunciation, but it is lacking when marking certain dialects. When used to reconstruct Middle Chinese, the tool will be "not precise enough".

However, this problem is not difficult to solve. A series of phonetic symbols were invented to mark the initials and finals of dialects that previously lacked phonetic symbols. At the same time, the tonal changes were marked more carefully. In addition to indicating the pitch of the text at different stages, it was also necessary to indicate its length and changes at each stage.

This is actually very important. To give a simple example, the difference between the first tone (yinping) and the second tone (rusheng) is that they both start with the first tone (yinping), but the ending tone is different: one rises clear and bright, while the other falls turbid and slurred.

In short, sound information can be recorded using symbols. If Middle Chinese and dialects are more complex than the current symbol system, then we can create a more complex symbol system for them, and they can still be recorded.

With this complete symbol system, a pinyin system can be constructed. This system can teach people, and more importantly, computers, to read out various dialects.

The works of the other experts also have similar problems, some even more crude than Zhao Yuanren's method. Using crude theories to construct a refined language system inevitably leads to various flaws.

Therefore, the research process of this project is not only to verify the theories of several modern masters, but also to expand and refine their theories. In the process of expansion and refinement, their theories will be continuously improved. In the end, they will all arrive at the same conclusion and construct a new structure for the reconstruction of Chinese phonetics and phonology that can guide the reconstruction of Middle Chinese and modern Chinese.

This topic is the simplest; the second topic, the collation of ancient elementary texts from the Qing Dynasty, is relatively more difficult.

The great scholars of philology in the Qing Dynasty, including Gu Yanwu, Jiang Yong, Dai Zhen, Duan Yucai, Kong Guangsen, Wang Niansun, Jiang Yougao, Zhang Binglin, and Huang Kan, were essentially collating the works of these scholars when it came to ancient book collation.

There are two major problems with elementary studies in the Qing Dynasty. One is that the writings of various famous scholars are not scientifically systematic. Some of them do not even have a monograph. Instead, they write in their notes here and there, which are very scattered.

If a person is scattered, they will be even more scattered when there are many people.

The second issue is the emergence of numerous schools of thought, the two largest being the archaeological school and the phonetic school. While each master might be both an archaeologist and a phonetic expert, the academic distinctions between the two schools were quite clear, and their respective emphases were evident in their writings. The third issue was that the study of Middle and Old Chinese phonology was still in its infancy at the time. This infancy meant that everyone was still exploring and had not yet developed a scientific, systematic, and standardized academic research methodology.

The strongest evidence is the Qing scholars' understanding of the entering tone.
This is a very strange phenomenon. China's emphasis on the humanities is self-evident, yet the study of ancient phonology only began very late.

The fundamental reason why Qing scholars devoted themselves to this area was the cruelty of the literary inquisitions during the Qing Dynasty, which forced them to forge an academic path different from that of Han and Tang scholars. Innovating their methods of understanding the classics and correctly recognizing phonetic evolution greatly helped to dispel the confusion caused by linguistic phenomena such as phonetic loan characters, word differentiation, and compound words.

This approach broke the flaw of Tang and Song Confucian scholars who dared not question the classics. Starting with Qing Confucian scholars, when they could not understand the classics, they no longer had to resort to the dead method of "forcing an interpretation" based on the literal meaning of the text. Instead, they were able to consider the possibility of phonetic substitutions through phonetic relationships.

There is a tendency in the study of unearthed documents that when encountering an uncommon character, the first thing that comes to mind is its interchangeability. This theoretical viewpoint is in fact an influence of the philology of Qing Dynasty scholars, and its application has only lasted for a short period of two hundred years.

The task of the Qing Dynasty Elementary School Ancient Book Collation Project Group was to collect and collate various works from the early stages of phonology, and summarize them into a system. Even if the system was incomplete, it was necessary to piece it together to form research results.

At the same time, existing specimen collections and tools should be used to verify their theories.

This research group has actually started to produce some results, but compared to the previous research group, the achievements of this research group so far seem to be more of a "gossip".

For example, Jiang Yong was the first to propose the dichotomy between "archaeology" and "phonetics," a view later adopted by his student Duan Yucai. Duan Yucai was a scholar who strictly adhered to his teacher's teachings, but eventually fell out with another scholar, Gu Guangqi.

The reason is that Gu Guangqi is nominally Duan Yucai's student, but his collation philosophy is completely contrary to Duan Yucai's, which is somewhat suspected of "betraying his teacher and ancestors".

Therefore, Duan Yucai's division of archaeology and phonetics was undoubtedly a complete continuation of Jiang Yong's ideas. Jiang Yong, in evaluating Gu Yanwu's research on ancient phonology, pointed out that Gu Yanwu's "achievements in archaeology were greater, while his achievements in phonetics were less significant." The implication is that Gu Yanwu was actually capable of both archaeology and phonetics.

The academic community previously hailed Gu Yanwu and Jiang Yong as the founders of the archaeological and phonetic schools, respectively, which is somewhat incorrect. After all, both men were proficient in both schools of thought, albeit with different emphases, and both were masters of their generation.

These are all anecdotes discovered while compiling information; Zhou Zhi thinks they can be simply called "gossip," and they don't have much academic value. (End of Chapter)