Language and Writing (Extra Spring Festival Update 35)
Suddenly, overnight, the spring wind came, and thousands upon thousands of pear trees blossomed. That morning, when Luo Chong emerged from the cave, the first thing he saw was this scene. The open ground before the cave was blanketed in white, and the great trees in the jungle were laden with snow. The long-awaited winter had arrived.
Snowflakes as large as goose feathers were still falling. The sky was gloomy, and no one knew when the snowfall would end. As usual, Luo Chong practiced a set of spear techniques to loosen up his muscles and bones.
The tribespeople also came out to relieve themselves. The men's lumber work had stopped, and the women were no longer making a fuss about gathering food. They merely went to the livestock pen and fed the takins some hay.
Rou Rou and Hui Shan, however, did not need to be fed. The two of them had not been tied up inside the livestock shed. Those two brutes were simply too strong. Luo Chong was afraid they would pull the shed down, so he had not restricted their freedom. They could only move around inside the enclosure, though, and whenever they grew hungry, they would find food for themselves in the haystack there.
The problem of water still had to be solved. Luo Chong had someone build an earthen stove inside the livestock pen and boil snow water for them in the Pottery Pot.
As soon as the livestock pen was opened in the morning, the two brutes dashed out and went racing madly through the snow. Dinophants' long legs were not slow at all when running through the snow. Although they lacked the long fur of mammoths, their thick skin and layers of fat were enough to let them survive the winter safely.
Once Rou Rou grew tired from running, it returned to the livestock pen on its own and stayed beside Hui Shan near the earthen stove, where it was still warm.
With snow falling outside, brickmaking was out of the question for now. They would wait until the snow stopped. The tribespeople all holed up inside the cave as well. Some spaced out, some made babies, and some polished ornaments. The children gathered around to watch the rabbits nurse. The twenty newborn rabbits were already a month old and were growing quickly. The cave was warm, and someone handled all their eating, drinking, defecating, and urinating. They were living in utter comfort.
Several girls from the former Tree Tribe and Baldy Tribe took the initiative to seek Luo Chong out to make babies. What the hell was he supposed to do about that? Although Luo Chong was the chieftain, he was only eleven years old. It was true that people could do that at this age, especially since primitive people matured early, but Luo Chong truly had no such thoughts at present. Besides, he was not interested in them.
Thus, Luo Chong began the plan he had been plotting for a long time: popularizing Mandarin and writing.
Winter lasted so long. He could not let it go to waste like this. They had to seize the time to study. Relying entirely on gestures and guesses to communicate had already driven Luo Chong to his limit. If he had not spoken while gesturing every time he communicated with others, he feared he might have become unable to speak at all.
In fact, the tribespeople of the Han Tribe had already mastered some vocabulary. Qu Bing in particular had the strongest learning ability for a child. He also interacted with Luo Chong more than anyone else, and he could now speak some simple sentences.
As for the ordinary tribespeople, most of what they had learned were nouns Luo Chong had drilled into them.
Language was actually a very simple thing. It consisted of only a few categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and abstract terms.
As long as one mastered nouns and verbs, one could manage simple communication.
It was just like how children learned to speak. First, they learned the names of various things—that is, nouns—then added some verbs, and language could be formed.
Take "I eat meat," for example. "I" was the noun representing oneself, "eat" was a verb, and "meat" was the name of a kind of food, which was also a noun. These three simple words formed a sentence from nouns and a verb. Thus, as long as they mastered more vocabulary, simple communication would not be a problem.
In fact, Luo Chong had also been subtly changing them in this regard. When humans encountered something new, especially something they had never seen before, they instinctively wanted to know what it was. Luo Chong was the one who gave them the answers.
For example, when people first saw a basket, they knew it was useful but did not know what it was called. Thus, they learned the noun "basket" from Luo Chong and remembered it. The next time someone said the word "basket," everyone would know what they meant.
There were countless examples like this. The people had already learned many nouns from Luo Chong, such as baskets, spears, fish, grass, carts, earth, bricks, takins, trees, axes, ropes, and so on.
For anything whose name they could not say, they could obtain the answer from Luo Chong. Chinese had developed for thousands of years, and even now, there was hardly anything that lacked a name. Every object and phenomenon had corresponding language with which it could be expressed. What Luo Chong had to teach them now was how to connect nouns and verbs in use.
As for Chinese characters, teaching them Simplified Characters was not realistic at present. They were too difficult to understand. The development of Chinese characters had also gone through several stages.
From the simple drawings of primitive times—cave paintings—to Oracle Bone Script on animal bones and tortoise shells during the Shang and Zhou periods, then to Small Seal Script during the Warring States period, and finally to the Great Seal Script unified by Qin Shi Huang. Although Great Seal Script was also called writing, it was also called Hieroglyphs. Its forms were extremely intricate. Unless one looked carefully, it was easy to mistake what the drawing depicted. Reading Great Seal Script basically depended on guessing and hazarding guesses. Some people could look at something they had written a few years earlier and fail to recognize it themselves.
By the time of the Han Dynasty, Clerical Script had appeared, and writing had become much more standardized. Although it was still Traditional Characters, it already differed greatly from mere "drawings." At the very least, the situation where people could not recognize their own writing no longer occurred.
Moreover, Clerical Script was the generation closest to Hieroglyphs. One could still see many traces of pictographs in it, making it easy for primitive people to accept. They could even find the corresponding objects in the forms of the characters, making their meanings easy to understand.
Modern Simplified Characters were different. They no longer had any connection to real objects. It was impossible to find a character's meaning from its shape. Without learning them from childhood, they were very difficult to understand.
Foreign students had the most experience with this. Learning China's Simplified Characters was incredibly difficult. Yet when foreigners learned Hieroglyphs, or even relatively modern Traditional Characters, they could learn them quickly. That was the advantage of ideographic writing.
Chinese characters were ideograms, completely different from the phonetic scripts of Japan, Korea, Europe, and America. One could even say they were languages from two different planets. English in particular was phonetic writing. It had only twenty-six letters with different pronunciations, which were combined into various words and sentences. Compared with the complexity of Chinese characters, it was practically the simplest form of writing.
With ideograms, one did not even need to know how a character was pronounced to discern its meaning from its shape. With the alphabetic and phonetic scripts of Europe, America, Japan, and Korea, one could only see the pronunciation from the letters, while having no idea what they meant.
Therefore, if extraterrestrial civilizations existed, they would probably be more likely to use Chinese characters as well. Chinese characters had evolved from pictures and were the only writing system on Earth where one could understand the meaning simply by looking at the form. Calling them the universal writing system of the universe would not be an overstatement.
What Luo Chong taught them was Clerical Script. He did not require them to write it, only to recognize it. For now, learning to speak was the priority, and the requirements for writing were not high.
Learning characters was something children had to complete. The workload was not large, either, and recognition was the focus. They studied the simple nouns they had already mastered, all of them commonly used characters.
There was no paper or brush now. There was not even enough room for each person to set up a Sand Table, so having them practice writing was unrealistic.
Luo Chong could only use a charred carbon stick to write on the cave's rock walls. He had the tribespeople repeat after him, checked their lessons once every day before dinner, and cut the evening meal in half for anyone who could not recite them. Those who studied well also received rewards, such as the Sugar-roasted Chestnuts Luo Chong made with Man-eating Tree Root Nodule Syrup.
This greatly stimulated the students' enthusiasm for learning. After all, who could possibly hold a grudge against food? They did not want to sit there hungry while watching someone else eat delicious things.
~
~
~
~
~
Please recommend, bookmark, comment, and tip (^ω^)
The fourth update will be at six in the afternoon, and the fifth will still be at 23:50 tonight.
Before you continue