Language and Writing

Chapter 47: Language and Writing (Spring Festival Explosive Update 35)

Suddenly, like a spring breeze overnight, a thousand trees and ten thousand pear blossoms bloomed. This morning, when Luo Chong emerged from the cave, the first thing he saw was this scene. The open ground in front of the cave was a vast expanse of white, and the large trees in the jungle were also covered with snow. The long-awaited winter had arrived.

Goose-feather-like snowflakes were still falling, and the sky was overcast. He didn't know when it would stop. Luo Chong practiced a set of spear techniques as usual, warming up his muscles and bones.

The tribe members also came out to relieve themselves. The men's logging work stopped, and the women no longer fussed about gathering food. They just went to the livestock pen and fed some dry grass to the Sable Antelopes.

Rou Rou and Hui Shan didn't need to be fed. They weren't tied up in the livestock shed. Those two were too strong, and Luo Chong was afraid they would pull the shed down, so he didn't restrict their freedom. However, they could only move around in the pen. When they were hungry, they would go to the haystack in the pen to find food themselves.

However, the issue of drinking water needed to be resolved. Luo Chong had someone build a dirt stove in the livestock pen and used a Pottery Pot to boil some snow water for them to drink.

As soon as the livestock pen opened in the morning, those two ran out and frolicked in the snow. The Dinophants' long legs were surprisingly fast in the snow. Although they didn't have the long fur of mammoths, their thick skin and fat allowed them to survive the winter safely.

When Rou Rou got tired of running, it returned to the livestock pen on its own and stayed beside the dirt stove with Hui Shan, where it was still warm.

It was snowing outside, so brick making was out of the question for now. They would wait until the snow stopped. The tribe members were all huddled in the cave, some spacing out, some procreating, some polishing ornaments. The children were watching the rabbits nurse. The 20 newborn rabbits were already a month old and growing very quickly. The cave was warm, and they were served for everything, eating, drinking, and relieving themselves. They were living a life of ease.

Several girls from the former Tree Tribe and Baldy's tribe actively sought out Luo Chong to procreate. What the hell could he do? Although Luo Chong was the chieftain, he was only 11 years old. Although he could technically do that at this age, given that primitive people matured early, Luo Chong really had no such thoughts right now. Besides, Luo Chong wasn't interested in them.

So Luo Chong began his long-planned project: popularizing Mandarin and Chinese Characters.

Winter was so long; they couldn't just waste it. They had to seize the time to learn. Relying entirely on gestures and guessing for communication was something Luo Chong had had enough of. If Luo Chong hadn't gestured while speaking every time he communicated with others, he worried he might have lost the ability to speak altogether.

In fact, the members of the Han Tribe had already mastered some vocabulary, especially Qu Bing. Children have the strongest learning ability, and he had more contact with Luo Chong. He could now speak some simple sentences.

As for the ordinary tribe members, most of what they learned were nouns that Luo Chong had instilled in them.

Language is actually a very simple thing. It's composed of only a few categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and abstract words.

As long as you master nouns and verbs, you can achieve simple communication.

This is like a child learning to speak. First, they learn the names of various things, which are nouns, and then add some verbs to form language.

For example, "I eat meat." "I" is a noun representing oneself, "eat" is a verb, and "meat" is the name of a food, also a noun. These three simple words form a language composed of a noun and a verb. So, as long as you master more vocabulary, achieving simple communication is not a problem.

In fact, Luo Chong had been subtly changing them in this regard. When humans encounter something new, especially something they have never seen before, they instinctively want to know what it is, and Luo Chong is the one who gives them the answer.

For example, when people first saw a basket, this thing was very useful, but they didn't know what it was called. So they learned the noun "basket" from Luo Chong's mouth and remembered it. The next time someone said the word "basket," others would know what they were talking about.

Similarly, people had already learned many nouns from Luo Chong's mouth, such as: basket, spear, fish, grass, cart, earth, brick, Sable Antelope, tree, axe, rope, etc.

Anything they couldn't name, they could get the answer from Luo Chong. Chinese has developed for thousands of years, and there is nothing that cannot be named now. Everything can be expressed with a corresponding language. What Luo Chong was going to teach them now was how to use nouns and verbs together.

As for Chinese Characters, teaching them Simplified Characters now was not realistic; they were too difficult to understand. The development of Chinese Characters also had to go through several stages.

From the simple pictures of the primitive era, which were murals, to the Oracle Bone Script on animal bones and turtle shells during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, then the Small Seal Script during the Warring States period, and finally the Great Seal Script unified by Qin Shi Huang. Although the Great Seal Script was also called writing, it was also called Hieroglyphs. The characters were very complex, and if you weren't careful, you could easily misinterpret what was drawn. Reading the Great Seal Script basically relied on a combination of guessing. Some people couldn't even recognize what they had written themselves after a few years.

By the Han Dynasty, there was Clerical Script, and the characters became much more standardized. Although they were still Traditional Characters, there was a significant difference from "drawing." At least, the situation where you couldn't recognize what you had written yourself no longer happened.

Moreover, Clerical Script was the generation closest to Hieroglyphs, and you could still see many traces of Hieroglyphs. This made it easy for primitive people to accept. They could even find corresponding things in the characters themselves, making it easy to understand the meaning of the characters.

Modern Simplified Characters are different. They have no connection to real-world things. You cannot find the meaning of a character in its shape. It is difficult to understand unless you have studied it since childhood.

Foreign students have the most experience with this. Learning Chinese Simplified Characters is very, very difficult. However, it is much easier for foreigners to learn Hieroglyphs, and even the Traditional Characters of recent times. This is the advantage of ideographic characters.

Chinese Characters are ideographic characters, completely different from the phonetic characters of Japan, Korea, Europe, and America. They can even be said to be languages from two different planets. Especially English, which is a phonetic language with only 26 letters representing different sounds, forming various words and sentences. Compared to the complexity of Chinese Characters, it is simply the simplest writing system.

With ideographic characters, you don't even need to know how to pronounce them to understand their meaning from their shape. With the phonetic alphabetic languages of Japan, Korea, Europe, and America, you can only see the pronunciation from the literal surface, but you have no idea what it means.

Therefore, if there is extraterrestrial civilization, it is more likely that they would use Chinese Characters. Chinese Characters evolved from pictures and are the only writing system on Earth whose meaning can be understood by looking at its form. It is not an exaggeration to say that they are a universal language of the universe.

Luo Chong taught them Clerical Script. They were not required to write it, but they had to recognize it. The focus was on learning to speak, and the requirement for writing was not high.

Learning Chinese Characters was something that children had to complete, and the homework load was not heavy. The focus was on recognizing characters, and they learned simple nouns that they had already mastered, which were common characters.

There was no paper or pen now, not even a place for each person to set up a sandbox, so it was not realistic to expect them to practice writing.

Luo Chong could only use a blackened charcoal stick to write on the cave wall, having the tribe members follow along and read. He checked their homework before dinner every day. Those who couldn't read would have their dinner halved, and those who learned well would be rewarded, such as with Sugar-roasted Chestnuts made by Luo Chong using Man-eating Tree Root Nodule Syrup.

This greatly stimulated the students' enthusiasm for learning. After all, who had a grudge against food? They didn't want to go hungry while watching others eat delicious food.

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The fourth update is at 6 PM, and the fifth update is still at 11:50 PM.