Wanli 1592

Chapter 987 phonetic notation

In early April, Xiao Ruxun received a gift from the newly established Ministry of Education.

The Minister of Education was named by Kong Shangxian, the patriarch of the Kong clan in Qufu, but he only held this position in Qufu.

In fact, several of Xiao Ruxun's trusted officials are in charge of this department. Right now, this department does not have much to do, and there is no addition of scholars and talents, because they are responsible for the innovation of printing technology.

Although movable type printing was invented in the Northern Song Dynasty, this technology did not play as big a role as imagined in the hundreds of years from the Song Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty.

More often, it is used as a supplement to woodblock printing. Unlike the dozens of letters in English, there are too many Chinese characters and too many fonts. The cost of printing with movable type is really high.

There are also some very practical reasons, that is, since the Song Dynasty, the books that China needs in large quantities are the Four Books and Five Classics, and the engravings are well preserved, and there are really few new books. Under the circumstances, movable type printing is indeed not so useful.

Engraving and printing work does not require literacy, but the employees of movable type printing need literate people to do typesetting and pick mistakes, and the cost will go up all at once.

Its advantage is reflected in that it can increase efficiency and reduce costs when printing a large number of books, but if it is only a few dozen or hundreds of books, the cost is actually much higher.

There are too many Chinese characters, too many fonts, the scope of application is not wide, the actual demand is small, clay type and wooden type are easily damaged, and copper type cannot be used in large quantities because of the lack of copper in China.

The Qing Dynasty once cast a set of tens of thousands of copper movable types, but later they were melted down to make copper coins due to financial difficulties.

For various reasons, the role of movable type printing in ancient times was not as great as modern people think, but it had a huge impact in the West. Gutenberg’s invention of lead movable type printing had far more influence than Bi Sheng’s invention. The influence of clay movable type printing is great.

Xiao Ruxun learned that there were actually printing companies in Changzhou that used raw materials such as copper and lead to make movable type, so he sent people to Changzhou to find someone, and brought them back to the capital after finding them, so that they could improve the technology of movable type with the support of the Daqin government. .

They asked them to bring all the movable copper types in their hands to the government. Xiao Ruxun found that these were movable copper types, not copper molds that could be used repeatedly. He could not afford the high cost, so he ordered to make new ones. copper mold.

Officials who are good at calligraphy are sent to write standard regular script as word marks, and use this as a standard to make copper molds. Old craftsmen who have experience in making molds in military factories are sent to guide them and make copper molds that can be used repeatedly.

Only at this time did the officials of the Ministry of Education know that what the emperor wanted to do was not simply moveable type, but copper molds that could be used repeatedly. Once the copper molds were made, they could be standardized, and many complete sets of lead type were produced and distributed to local governments. in use.

Based on the financial support of the Daqin government, large-scale production of copper molds will not worry about financial difficulties.

After making a copper mold, it can be reused many times to produce a large amount of lead type. Xiao Ruxun definitely needs more than just the Four Books and Five Classics. The existing engraving blocks cannot meet his needs, so he needs a lot of movable type for In the future, various books will be printed in preparation.

At the same time, Xiao Ruxun also ordered the craftsmen to improve the ink used in printing and conduct research on the ink.

Xiao Ruxun told them that in the Europa continent, more than 100 years ago, Xiyi had produced movable lead type and even a movable lead type printing machine that could be used on a large scale.

They use lead alloys as raw materials, lamp black and linseed oil as printing inks, and the quality of the books they produce is very good.

This has a great impact on the subordinate officials. It is hard for them to believe that there are countries other than the Heavenly Dynasty that have mastered such advanced cultural means.

Although there is no relevant technology, human wisdom cannot be underestimated.

After Xiao Ruxun gave directions and requirements, all the officials of the Ministry of Education were in operation. In order to get the emperor's reward and appreciation, and to maintain the dignity of the heavenly kingdom, they worked hard day and night, and finally printed the first book with movable lead type in early April. The thread-bound "Three Character Classic" was sent to Xiao Ruxun.

After Xiao Ruxun looked through it, she found that the book was indeed of high quality and exquisite, so she was very happy to go to the Ministry of Education to watch the on-site operation of the officials.

Although there are only hundreds of finished copper molds and lead type, there is also what looks like a printing press.

Xiao Ruxun went up and fiddled with it, and it felt similar to a suitcase. The paper was fixed on one side, and the movable type was painted with ink on the other side. Once the two sides were closed and then opened, it was a very good piece of paper with words.

Xiao Ruxun also looked at the ink. It is no longer pure ink, but has the feeling of ink, a little sticky. As for what is in it, Xiao Ruxun didn't ask, just let them continue to do it, and if they need it, just send the request Just send it to the Ministry of Households.

In addition to these things, Xiao Ruxun also found a group of Confucian scholars who had experience in educating Mongolian children in Beizhili and the three southeastern provinces, and asked them how to educate children to read. The answers they got were all unified, that is, the two words are tangent method, such as "Red, Hulongqie", using Chinese characters to phoneticize Chinese characters.

This method is much better than the earlier straight phonetic method, but since the upper characters of Fanqie represent initial consonants, they should only represent consonants, but in fact each Chinese character represents a complete syllable.

Since the lower characters of Fanqie represent finals, they should only represent vowels, but similarly, there are very few Chinese characters beginning with vowels, so it is often necessary to borrow Chinese characters with consonants as the lower characters for Fanqie.

Of course, the more important thing is that learning is relatively slow, it is difficult to spread on a large scale, and the local accents are also very different, so there are some problems in communicating with each other.

Although all dynasties have had mandarin, Xiao Ruxun hopes to spread mandarin to all parts of the country. People all over the country will speak a kind of mandarin, and they can communicate in mandarin without causing communication problems in accent.

After realizing the limitations of the two-character tangent pronunciation method, Xiao Ruxun thought of the Chinese Pinyin, the Western alphabet that is very suitable for phonetic notation, and by the way, Lima who is still in Myanmar. sinus.

This guy can learn Chinese as an Italian, and Xiao Ruxun really wants to know his learning method.

Moreover, Xiao Ruxun vaguely remembered that Matteo Ricci once worked with someone to create the first Roman phonetic notation project for Chinese characters in history, which seemed to be specially used to help missionaries learn Chinese.

Xiao Ruxun summoned Matteo Ricci from Burma to the capital and asked him how he learned Chinese phonetic notation in Roman characters. Matteo Ricci was very pleasantly surprised and honored, and immediately revealed his method of learning Chinese.

Xiao Ruxun roughly observed Matteo Ricci's method, and found that he did use the same method as the 26 modern English letters to annotate Chinese characters, but there are no double letters like zh and ch. Matteo Ricci said that this method can Very good for phonetic notation of Chinese characters.

However, there is a little difference with modern pinyin, the difference is not big, it is probably the problem of accent.

After thinking about it, Xiao Ruxun gathered the officials of the Ministry of Education together and proposed this phonetic literacy method to them.

(End of this chapter)