Fifty-six Hanyu Pinyin (Upper)

  Chang Sun was also a bookworm, and during his interactions with Su Ning, he increasingly felt the gap between himself and Su Ning. However, he thought this gap wasn't that big, but now it seems that such a gap had already begun from birth. Su Ning was born to follow his master on adventures all over the country, gaining insight into countless principles, while Chang Sun was born into a life of luxury, never experiencing the outside world firsthand, only knowing things through others' words or books.

  How can such a gap be made up? The ancients said, "Read ten thousand volumes of books, travel ten thousand miles", isn't that reasonable? With Suning's huge gap, how can it be made up? Zhang Song felt unprecedented confusion...

  The yellow-clothed girl who had just been hostile to Su Ning was also stunned, and after a while, she slowly came back to her senses, carefully savoring Su Ning's words, her eyes looking at Su Ning with an increasingly strange gaze...

  Kong Yingda was older, had read more books, and was a direct descendant of the Kong family, so he had a deeper understanding of these words. Every word that Suning said was deeply etched in his mind, and he was thoroughly stunned by this reasoning. What kind of extraordinary person could have come up with such an idea? When he himself studied, he had not been without doubts and questions, and he had wanted to come up with new answers, but as a descendant of Confucius, he had always taken it upon himself to maintain the orthodoxy of the Kong family. He believed that change was disrespecting one's ancestors, and out of reverence for his ancestors, he did not dare make any moves that would be disrespectful. Therefore, he had made no changes.

  But Su Ning's words made him question his long-held beliefs. His heart told him that Su Ning was right, reading books wasn't just about reading the books themselves, but about learning from the spirits of the past and making changes based on what they had learned, surpassing them! Only by surpassing each generation can a nation prosper and a country have hope. If one only studies the works of the ancients and worships their writings, how can there be progress? Isn't that just self-imposed stagnation, isn't that the correct principle?

  Kong Yingda was suddenly awakened, the shackles that had troubled him for many years disappeared in an instant. Kong Yingda suddenly felt a sense of relief he had never experienced before. His eyes were clear and bright, the dark clouds had dispersed, and the sunlight shone through, everything was so fresh and natural. It turned out to be like this, it turned out that he had always made such a mistake, such an ignorant and terrible mistake! He had been immersed in his ancestors' achievements all along, never thinking of continuing his ancestors' glory, continuing his ancestors' unfinished business!

  Su Ning suddenly felt that Kong Yingda had undergone some changes, Kong Yingda's eyebrows seemed to have lost a few points of melancholy and gained a few points of calmness, what was wrong with this old man?

  Kong Yingda came back to his senses, his eyes clear and bright. He looked at Su Ning and smiled: "I really didn't expect it, the problem that has been troubling me for many years was solved by you in one sentence. Your life may be unfortunate, but it is also a fortunate misfortune. Your master is an extraordinary master, far superior to me! After reading books for 50 years, I still haven't grasped such truth. What's learned from books is always superficial, and only through personal experience can one truly understand. The learning of your master is indeed admirable!"

  "Alas, Master has already ascended to the west on the back of a crane. Otherwise, I would have abandoned all official positions and entered your esteemed school as a disciple, even if it meant doing menial tasks like serving tea and water, just to be able to listen to your teachings from time to time. That would have been enough for this life! Sanming, what you have learned is far superior to the knowledge I possess, and I am not capable of teaching you anything else. If I were to try, it would only harm you. All I can do is help you consolidate your learning, teach you some principles about cultivating one's character and nurturing one's nature, and that's all."

  Kong Yingda let out a deep sigh and slowly walked back to the podium, facing more than 40 students who were still in a daze. "Today's words of Sanming," he said, "you must remember them well. You should know that knowledge gained from books is always superficial. You absolutely cannot be confined to book learning. As Sanming said, book knowledge is just knowledge. What you need from now on is real scholarship, is truth and reason. Knowledge that has not been put into practice cannot become true scholarship."

  "You should also know that the purpose of reading is not to cater to me, nor to your parents, nor to His Majesty, but for your own learning. You are born into a noble family and will become high-ranking officials in the Tang Dynasty. As the saying goes, 'Heaven will entrust great responsibilities to this person', one must first suffer in their heart and will, labor their muscles and bones, starve their body, empty their mind, and be frustrated by their actions. Therefore, I hope you will remember today's words and take care of yourselves."

  Kong Yingda spoke a great truth, and all the students came to their senses. They bowed deeply to Kong Yingda: "The disciples understand." In their hearts, they were also quite upset, today would be the most unforgettable day in their hearts.

  "Sanming, I don't have anything to give you, but tell me, can you read? You haven't read any of those enlightening books, can you recognize characters?" Kong Yingda suddenly thought of a very important question. If someone as talented as him couldn't read, that would be a legendary anomaly...

  Su Ning nodded: "Of course I can read."

  Kong Yingda came with interest: "If you don't read books or primers, how did you learn to recognize characters?"

  Su Ning thought for a moment about the pre-school class in kindergarten and the first and second grades of elementary school, and suddenly remembered, Hanyu Pinyin! It's been many years since I last used it. Hanyu Pinyin is absolutely a great helper for recognizing characters! It's still a magical tool for mastering Mandarin, no matter what its original purpose was. Now, it has been proven to be an extremely effective helper for recognizing characters.

  "So it's a character recognized by pinyin."

  "What's 'pinyin'?" Kong Yingda was taken aback, how could this kid say something that he had never heard of? Is this the knowledge of that master? Alas! I am indeed a frog at the bottom of the well, presumptuously guessing the learning of a superior man, guilty! Guilty!

  Su Ning nodded: "Right, pinyin. Master said that this was also sorted out after several decades of use. He said that the words we speak are characters that can be written down, and the pronunciation of these characters follows certain rules. For example, some characters have similar pronunciations, such as 'da' in 'fight', 'big', 'developed', and 'match'. In fact, they sound different only because of differences in tone, but actually belong to the same phonetic category."

  The master seemed to have referenced a language from the far west, and using his knowledge of phonetics, annotated all writable characters with phonetic symbols. As a result, when I was young, I hadn't read any books, but had seen many characters, poems, couplets, and famous quotes annotated with phonetic symbols by my master. First, I memorized the pronunciation of those characters, then gradually removed the phonetics, until all phonetics were removed, and without the aid of phonetics, I could recognize all the characters completely. As long as there are phonetics, even if I don't know a character, I can still read it.

  Kong Yingda's eyes widened, and more than 40 young men and women were also extremely shocked. The stimulation they received that day was too much, and their brains had some difficulty accepting it; Kong Yingda had seen the world after all, so he quickly regained his composure and asked: "The language of the extreme west? And its phonology?"

  For a fairly long period of time in ancient China, roughly from the Eastern Han dynasty onwards, Chinese people used the "two-character chopping" method to read and recognize characters. This method involved combining two characters to produce the pronunciation of another character, with the top character providing the initial consonant sound and the bottom character providing the vowel sound and tone, such as "hóng" being pronounced by combining the initial consonant sound of "hū" with the vowel sound and tone of "lóng". However, this method was inaccurate in terms of pronunciation, had a low rate of popularization, and was inefficient. The prerequisite for recognizing characters is to recognize characters themselves, making it unsuitable for widespread promotion. As for the previously used direct phonetic method, it was even more inappropriate.

  The earliest appearance of Pinyin was during the late Ming Dynasty. Initially, Pinyin was created by foreigners to facilitate communication with China. The original purpose of Chinese Pinyin was to abolish Chinese characters, which was a proposal put forward by some radical intellectuals at the end of the Qing Dynasty when the country was in crisis. They believed that Chinese characters were independent of other languages and this was the reason for China's backwardness. Lu Xun even claimed: "If Chinese characters are not abolished, China will perish!" Many intellectuals thought this was correct, so they began to create new Chinese characters similar to Western Romanization and Latinization.

  But how can the 5,000-year-old tradition of Huaxia be eliminated? Chinese characters stand alone in the world, and Huaxia can still create world miracles and stand at the top of the world for a considerable period. What does the extinction or destruction of China have to do with Chinese characters? Su Ning didn't understand, and the old man scolded those intellectuals who tried to abolish Chinese characters as "forgetting their ancestors". However, in some sense, this was a movement of Chinese people trying to catch up with the world trend, so it didn't stop but continued to develop. After the founding of the country, the state began to prepare for new Chinese characters more intensively, and Hanyu Pinyin was born. However, soon people found that Chinese characters were irreplaceable for Chinese people. After reform and opening up, the plan to abolish Chinese characters was abandoned, and Hanyu Pinyin as a widely promoted literacy auxiliary system received widespread acclaim.

  Suning said: "Yes! Master seemed to have said that the reason why Master wanted to create Pinyin in the first place was because he considered the difficulties of people from different places communicating with each other and the difficulty of recognizing characters; Teacher, think about it, our Great Tang is so big, right? The way of speaking and pronunciation between Jiangnan and Jiangbei are very different, and it seems that communication between a person from Jiangnan and a person from Jiangbei is not easy.

  The dialects of Jiangnan and Jiangbei also include our Guanzhong dialect, Shu dialect, Shandong dialect, Hebei dialect, and the dialects near Tujue are even similar to Tujue language. Often, when people from one region go to another region, they can't find anyone who can communicate smoothly with them. They all speak, recognize characters, and write, but they can't understand each other's words. Isn't this just like being deaf? This has a very serious impact on communication between regions.

  So the master thought, whether it is possible to create a universally used pronunciation that is not specific to any region, because adopting any regional dialect as a universal pronunciation would be disrespectful to other regions and could easily lead to local disputes. The master's idea was not to abolish local accents, but people from different regions could still use their own local accents when communicating with each other, while using this universal pronunciation for inter-regional communication, which would allow for smooth communication without affecting the importance of local accents.

  Although the Great Tang Dynasty currently uses Guanzhong dialect as the official language, I think this is somewhat disrespectful to the people of other regions. It makes us Guanzhong people seem too overbearing and not conducive to national unity, especially in border areas where the situation is complex with Han and Hu living together. If there's a dialect that everyone in the Great Tang can understand, that would be best.

  PS: The official language of the Tang Dynasty is called Jinling Luoxia Yin, which seems to be closer to today's Minnan and Hakka dialects. I don't quite understand what kind of pronunciation it is, so I've made a note here. For the sake of the plot, we'll use Guanzhong dialect as the official accent of the Tang Dynasty.