Chapter 22 Chapter 7 The Development of the Relationship between Chinese Characters and Chinese Language

In modern speech, there are differences between Mandarin and dialects, and there are also differences between reading sounds and spoken sounds.These are also reflected in the pronunciation.For example, the word "日" is read as "one" by people from Northeast China, "two" by people from Hubei, and "ten" by people from Shanghai; Recommend Xuanyuan with my blood", read xie according to the colloquial pronunciation, "bleeding from injury". The more obvious difference is that the difference in ancient and modern phonetics causes the difference in pronunciation of ancient and modern characters.For example, ancient Chinese poetry paid attention to rhyming, but many ancient poems don’t rhyme very much when read today, and some even don’t rhyme at all.For example, the following five-character quatrain:

The rhymes of this poem are "side" and "knowledge".They are pronounced as Qusheng and Shangsheng respectively in Mandarin today, and the finals are also different, and they do not rhyme with each other.But in the Tang Dynasty where Cui Hao lived, they were all entering tone characters, and their finals were similar, so they could rhyme.Rusheng characters have gradually disappeared in northern dialects since the Yuan Dynasty, and now they are only reserved in some dialects in the south. Most of Chinese characters belong to pictophonetic characters, that is, a pictograph, a phonetic symbol.The vast majority of pictographs and phonetic symbols are also characters that can exist independently.When pictophonetic characters were first created, the pronunciation of phonetic symbols and pictophonetic characters were consistent.But it is precisely because of the development of phonetics that the pronunciation of characters as phonetic symbols and the pronunciation of pictophonetic characters often change differently, so that phonetic symbols may not be able to represent phonetics accurately.The most typical example is the two words Xu Shen mentioned when he introduced the "phonetic" of "Liu Shu" in "Shuowen Jiezi·Xu": Jiang and He. The consonant of "Jiang" is "gong", and the consonant of "he" is "ke".In ancient times, the pronunciations of Jiang Gong and He Ke were the same, but today they are pronounced quite differently.Therefore, the same character is used as a phonetic symbol. Today, in different pictophonetic characters, some can accurately represent the sound, some can approximate the sound, and some can hardly represent the sound.For example, the same character "earth" as a phonetic symbol is phonetic in "spit" and "thorium" (a metal element), and approximate phonetic (at least rhyming) in "Tu" and "Du". In "she" and "zao", it can't play the role of sound symbols at all.For the recognition and reading of Chinese characters, there is often a saying in Chinese folk that "read half of the characters". "Half side" refers to the phonetic symbols of pictophonetic characters.Now we need to know that reading only "half" is unreliable and often leads to mistakes.This is also an aspect of the sound change of Chinese characters due to the development of Chinese phonetics, which we should pay special attention to when we understand Chinese characters.

In addition, due to historical reasons, some Chinese characters have different pronunciations when recording the same Chinese word. For example, the "wave" in "wave" has two sounds, bo and po, ​​and the "thin" in "thick and thin" has bo. There are two sounds of , bao, and the "shell" of "shell" has two sounds of ke and qiao.Such characters are called "different reading characters".Such different pronunciations do not have the function of distinguishing meanings, which in vain increase the burden of learning and memory, so they must be sorted out and streamlined.After sorting out, the standard pronunciations of the different pronunciation characters in the above examples are bo (wave), bo (thin) and ke (shell).