Chapter 115 postscript

Humans are creatures with language ability, but it is actually very difficult for human beings to speak. In 1988, I moved to the southernmost part of China, Hainan Island.I can't speak Hainan Hou, and I find this kind of language difficult to learn.One day, my friend and I went to the vegetable market to buy vegetables, and when we saw an unknown fish, we asked the local seller about it.He said it was fish.I said I knew it was a fish, may I ask what kind of fish it is?He widened his eyes and said, "Sea fish." I smiled, and I said I knew it was a sea fish, so may I ask, "What, what, sea, fish?" The other party's eyes widened even more, looking a little impatient. "Is it a big fish?"

My friend and I couldn't help laughing when we remembered this conversation afterwards. Hainanese have the largest sea area in the country, countless fishing villages, and a long-established fishing industry.I later learned that their vocabulary about fish should be said to be the largest.Real fishermen have specific words for hundreds of species, each part of fish and the winter breeding state of fish, and they all have detailed and accurate expressions and descriptions, enough to compile a thick dictionary.But most of these cannot enter Mandarin.Even the "Kangxi Dictionary" with the largest collection of entries, with more than 40,000 Chinese characters, is too far away from this island, excluding a large number of deep and rich feelings here from the field of vision, and from the brushes and inkstones made by the scholars.When I speak Mandarin with people here, when I force them to use a language they are not familiar with, they can only use "sea fish" or "big fish" to be vague.

I almost laughed at them, almost thought they were pitifully poor in language.Of course I was wrong.For me, they're not the ones I see, they're not the ones I'm talking about, they're sneering, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In the dark night that Mandarin Chinese cannot illuminate.They accepted this dark night. It reminds me of my hometown.I have been learning Mandarin for many years.I understand that it is necessary for me to be accepted by neighbors, colleagues, salesmen, policemen, officials, to communicate with TV, newspapers, and to enter the modern age.My experience of buying fish in the vegetable market just made me suddenly shocked: I have already Mandarinized.This also means that the hometown in my memory has also been put into Mandarin, and it is being filtered by a foreign language every day—under this filter, it is becoming a simple "big fish" and "sea fish", Simple and rough, drying up a little bit in the desert of the target language.

That's not to say hometown can't be talked about.No, it can still be discussed in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Hokkien, Tibetan, Uighur, and various foreign languages, but is the "Interaction of Destiny" produced by Jinghu still "Symphony of Destiny"? ?An apple that has left the land, an apple that has been steamed, is it still an apple? Dialect is certainly not the only language barrier, nor is regionality the only attribute of language.In addition to regionality, language at least has the dimension of time.A few days ago, I was talking with a friend, and I felt that the development of transportation and communication means has strengthened the horizontal connection between human beings and accelerated the process of cultural renewal in the near future.It may basically eradicate and melt the regional differences in culture, but it may expand and aggravate the differences of the times.The contemporaries in the global village eat the same food, wear the same clothes, live in the same houses, have the same ideas, and even speak the same language. But at that time, people in the 1950s understood the People, people born in 2020 understand people born in 2000. It may be as difficult as Hunan people want to understand Hainan culture, and Chinese people want to understand British culture.

In fact, the process has already begun.Within the same dialect, the so-called "generation gap" is not only manifested in the concepts of music, literature, clothing, employment, politics, etc., but also in the language—if an old man fully understands his son's words, he often gets An old force has become a common fact around us. "Three combinations", "Douxiaopiao", "old sayings", "ingredients"... a group of words quickly became something similar to old sayings, and did not settle in ancient books, did not withdraw from daily life, and were still in certain social circles It circulates in the country, just like the dialect circulates in the circle of fellow villagers.It is not a region but an era, not a space but a time, and various new language communities are being created.

This question can go further.Even if people transcend the barriers of geography and time, can they find a common language?A language professor conducted an experiment in which he said a word in class, such as "revolution", and asked the students to name the image that flashed in their minds when they heard the word.There are many kinds of answers; there are red flags, leaders, storms, fathers, banquets, prisons, political teachers, newspapers, vegetable markets, and accordions... The students use completely different personal lives Experience, made a completely different subconscious interpretation of the word "revolution".Of course, once they enter public communication, they have to obey the norms of authority, such as obeying a large dictionary.This is a compromise between the individual and the society, and a compromise between life experience and cultural tradition.But who can be sure that those fleeting images quietly missed in the compromise will not accumulate in the dark layer of consciousness into language tampering incidents that can erupt at any time?Who can be sure that when people are looking for and using a generalized Mandarin, when they overcome various language barriers in order to communicate with each other, new phenomena of ambiguity, ambiguity, ambiguity, and discrimination are not emerging in an endless stream?Isn't a process of non-generalization or de-generalization advancing simultaneously in people's hearts?

Strictly speaking, the so-called "common language" is always a distant goal for mankind.If we want communication to be a kind of mutual cancellation and mutual annihilation, we must be vigilant and resistant to communication, and guard our own tenacious expression in compromise-this is the premise of a benign communication.This means that when people speak, each person needs, if possible, a dictionary of his own. Words are living things.They reproduce densely, change frequently, gather and disperse, rise and fall, have migration and marriage, disease and heredity, character and emotion, prosperity, decline and death. Or short life, such words have been captured and imprisoned in my notebook for some time.I scrutinized, interrogated and investigated repeatedly, trying to be like a detective and discover the stories hidden behind these words, so I came up with this book.

Of course, this is only a dictionary for me, and it does not have any normative meaning for others.It's just one of many answers in a linguistics professor's lab class, and one can forget about it once the get out of class is over.