Oracle is heading into the digital age
Li Li
One of the most "fire" cultural IPs at the beginning of 2022 is the ancient oracle bone. The National Library of China and reading group launched the "Oracle Promotion Public Welfare Project", with the New Year keywords presented by Oracle on the social platform, the text exhibition starting from Oracle made a stunning appearance in Tianjin, 60 micro-novels created for Oracle were assembled and launched, and the online article festival updated with Oracle received hot reviews...
Oracle bone is the source of Chinese characters and the root of China's excellent traditional culture, and is the earliest mature script of the era discovered in China so far. Speaking of Oracle, I can't help but think of a poignant past, that is, at the moment when Chinese civilization was facing extinction, not far from now - the late nineteenth century. The political situation at that time, the land at that time, and the people's hearts at that time were like large cracks on the plate, and the water of civilization on the plate would soon all leak out. It was then, in the autumn of 1899, that an oracle bone was discovered in Beijing. This man's name was Wang Yirong, a modern Chinese epigrapher, collector and calligrapher, who was then the guozi supervisor of wine sacrifice, and was the head of the country's highest school at that time. When he was grasping medicine in Heniantang because of his proficiency in medicine, he bought a medicinal material called a dragon bone, studied the graphic text on it, and bought it in large quantities through Fan Weiqing, an antique dealer in Shandong. Wang Yirong, a epigrapher who studied the ancient Chinese Zhong Ding script, realized that the inscriptions on these turtle shells and animal bones should be a kind of record used by very distant ancients for divination, and he broke the oracle bone as the Shang Dynasty. Wang Yirong's initial judgment of the oracle bone script was confirmed by later research. This discovery caused a sensation in Chinese and foreign academic circles, pushing the history of Chinese characters to the Yin Shang era of more than 1700 BC, and Wang Yirong became the founder of oracle bone research. But before he could study it, his fate took a huge turn. The Boxers attacked Jingjin, and the attendants Li Duanyu and Wang Yirong were appointed as the training ministers of the Jingshi regiment and participated in the defense of the capital. The Eight-Power Alliance invaded Beijing, Li Hongzhang made peace with the Eight Kingdoms, and the Emperor fled with Cixi. Wang Yirong, as a commander in charge of defense affairs, did not want to become a prisoner of the Eight-Nation Alliance, so he wrote a desperate word, and after Dongzhimen was breached and lost, he returned to his home in Xila Hutong, Dongcheng District, Beijing, and took poison and threw himself into a well to martyr the country, at the age of 55. I believe that before he died, there must have been a lot of reluctance, and the most important thing may be the pile of oracle bones in his study. Oracle's sudden discovery was at such a time of wind and rain and blood. Wang Yirong was the first person to discover, collect and study oracle bones, and the international community regarded the year 1899 when he discovered the "keel" inscription as the beginning of oracle bone research. This momentous discovery revived the cultural memory of Chinese about their own people.
There seems to be a mysterious voice revealing this troubled land: you should not perish like this, you should listen to the voices of childhood. And that childhood song comes from Oracle. The discovery of the oracle bone not only marks that China has nearly 4,000 years of written history, but also provides extremely valuable information for the study of the history of Yin Shang. The discovery of the oracle bone, which directly led to the excavation of the Yin Ruins in Anyang, is as important as the discovery of the Trojan ruins in ancient Greece, and forms two new disciplines of oracle bone science and Yin Shang archaeology. The awakening of cultural memory is often activated by a discovery of the whole disk. Looking back at history for a hundred years, the great waves and sands, the wind and thunder stirring, the family hatred and national difficulties, the cannon fire strings, the hoarse and tragic shouts echoing in the middle, the overlapping footprints of hesitation and persistence... The awakening of China's ancient memory, opened by the oracle bone, is like a stubborn childhood song, rising from the thrilling national dark moment, telling us that this great civilization should not be doomed.
As a person who graduated from the department of Chinese and reads and writes every day, he has a heartfelt affection for this Chinese character that jumps and jumps. I think Chinese characters are the most amazing characters in the world.
Chinese characters are hieroglyphs, pictograms are pictures, and each Chinese character is a complete picture. Do you think Chinese characters are emoticons? Chinese grew up in the red book to learn and write, is to understand a variety of life situations and emotions: such as "laughing", that is, smiling face; "crying", is crying face; "death" has a feeling of majesty, but it is by no means generous, the posture of starting to walk is very blunt, very stubborn, there is a sense of contradiction that looks ahead and looks ahead. Chinese characters are living pictures in which everything in the world, including its taste, color and qualities, is contained in the original form of a script.
Compared with other scripts, the morphology of Chinese characters is very special, consisting of five types of strokes. Chinese characters are built from dot lines, according to the principle of balance between east and west in heaven and earth, yin and yang phases and eight directions of balance, is the ancestor of mechanics, but also the ancestor of philosophy, is the world's most magical text. According to the principle of mechanics, the only Chinese characters can lie down and stand up. All Chinese characters, with one horizontal above and one horizontal below, tell us that the upper horizontal is called the top heaven, and the lower horizontal is called standing earth. To be a man is to stand tall and upright.
Chinese characters are musical. Chinese characters have flat, up, go, into four tones, four tones, according to the four tones of Chinese characters, as well as the law of double sound overlapping rhymes, you can pursue the beauty of sound rhyme in the arrangement and combination of Chinese characters, that is, the coordination of sound rhymes. The musicality of Chinese characters has given rise to Chinese method of reading, chanting. Chanting is a kind of oral expression art of Chinese classical literary works between recitation and singing, which not only follows the characteristics of language, but also follows the personal understanding, follows the rhyme of the work, the mood and sorrow in the poem, the ups and downs of feelings, through their own tone of voice, highlighting the logical relationship, thought and emotion, which is much deeper and fuller than ordinary recitation, is a kind of careful reading, creative, evocative reading method and expression, is a synthesis of literature, music and language, It is the precious intangible cultural heritage of our Chinese nation.
Each Chinese character not only has an independent sound, shape, and meaning, but also has the "meaning" behind it, and has an independent life. For example, "wu" means "stopping the war", and "fate" means "prostrating one man", that is, lying on the ground and prostrating to all things, knowing that reverence is "destiny". "Exhaustion" is a hand holding a brush in the brush to wash the utensils, indicating that the diet has been exhausted, so as to indicate the end of the meaning. "Fu" learned from the oracle bone hieroglyph that a person held a wine altar sacrifice, wine is the essence of grain, the most precious thing in ancient times, to be sacrificed, so "dedication" is "blessing". "Teaching" In the oracle bone, the "text" on the right originally has a "heart" word, so in essence education is "the process of telepathy". The human mind is an extremely broad, complex and changeable world, the teacher is facing students with very different personalities and continuous development, and his education should be a comprehensive, three-dimensional, and continuous process, in which the most critical thing is to enter the heart of each student. "Good" in the oracle bone, a mother holding a child, shows that the values of Chinese culture originate from family affection - this is different from the Western values of God and advocating individualism, which is a "hegemonic" culture, while Chinese culture advocates "royal way" and pays attention to the time and place. The meaning of Chinese characters is also polysemantic, and many Chinese characters have been given several layers of meaning in the long process of use. For example, in Chinese characters, the magical word "taste" seems to be always full of infinite possibilities. In addition to what the tongue tastes and what the nose smells, in Chinese culture, the perception and definition of "taste" both originates from diet and transcends diet.
Chinese characters have a whole, because the Chinese way of thinking is holistic, from the beginning, Chinese studied the whole heaven and earth, the study is the continuous, its small and endless, its large and outer Tao and Qi, so Chinese never took things apart into parts to look at. When people open their eyes, what they see is also the complex and changeable images of people, animals and plants, landscapes, houses, cars, etc., rather than atoms and molecules that are differentiated. Although Chinese characters can be split into partial radicals, it is necessary to understand a Chinese character as a whole. Chinese characters are the condensation of the image understanding of the interaction between the Chinese ancestors and the outside world, which is both abstract and concrete, and fully embodies the Chinese's understanding of the world.
Remember that Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, a philosopher and linguist, has a famous hypothesis about the origin of human language, he said: "Maybe a long time ago some primates were wandering around, and suddenly, after being exposed to some strange cosmic radiation, some random mutation was produced, which reorganized the primate brain and implanted a language organ in it." Although the description is too literary, he insists that "this may be closer to the truth than other mythological stories related to evolution, including language." In Chinese culture, it has always been believed that the origin of language is not ordinary, but comes from the divine revelation of heaven and earth, the awakening of man. In the era of the Yellow Emperor of Xuanyuan, about 5,000 years ago, writing began to appear. Legend has it that the Yellow Emperor of Xuanyuan ordered the chancellor Cangjie to create characters, and Cangjie invented and created characters. According to legend, Cangjiesheng had "double pupils and four eyes", and he "looked at the style of the kui star circle and the traces of the hooves and claws of birds and beasts", creating various symbols representing everything in the world. He gave these symbols a name, just a word. The Huainan zi Benjingxun says: "In the past, Cangjie wrote books, but the sky rained and millet, and the ghosts cried at night." "Cangjie made words, shocked the world, and wept ghosts and gods." People find the word, and the word leaks the chance. The words frightened the ghosts and gods into crying, and the heavens and the earth were shocked. I think it is not too much to deify in any case, and the creation of writing is a major event in the long river of history. To this day, chinese characters still give divinity, with a divine word next to (show), the gods are in the place. There are more than 100 Chinese characters next to the chinese characters, that is, more than a hundred living gods who are enshrined in Chinese day and night!
Chinese characters have made immortal contributions to the reproduction and development of the Chinese nation and to the preservation and inheritance of Chinese civilization and Chinese culture. Ancient Chinese characters contain cultural inheritance, from which you can see the basic concepts, lifestyles, working styles, social mentality, etc. of the ancient people, which also involves a lot of knowledge of the natural world. We must not forget our ancestors. 1.4 billion Chinese live in different places, but there is a line that unites them, and that is the Chinese characters.
Regarding the dispute over the complexity and simplicity of Chinese characters over the past half century or so, my view is that from the perspective of the trend of the entire script, all texts are simplified and simplified, and this is the case from a historical point of view and a theoretical point of view. At present, some scholars have taken advantage of the upsurge of traditional cultural revival to call for the restoration of traditional chinese characters, which is against the trend of history. Of the original Documents of the United Nations, 80 per cent were in English, 15 per cent in French, 4 per cent in Spanish and the remaining 1 per cent in Russian, Arabic and Chinese. Less than 1%, how to compete with English? So we need to simplify and find ways to make it acceptable to the world in order to really play a role. From the perspective of Chinese characters going to sea and going to the world, modern Chinese characters are not simplified enough. I think there may be another simplification of Chinese characters in the late 21st century. The advent of the era of globalization requires a different worldview than in the past. In the past, we looked at the world from China, but now we must look at China from the world. As soon as this perspective changes, everything must be re-recognized. We cannot simply and rudely think that simplified characters have completely destroyed Chinese culture, simplified characters and traditional characters are similar to Chinese, Chinese Simplified easy to use, which is precisely a kind of progress. The simplification of Chinese characters is a historical necessity, and the simplification of Chinese characters from the Jin Wen Seal Book to the present is the trend of the times. There is no conflict between the reform and inheritance of writing, not everyone can understand the oracle bone, in order to save the Chinese civilization, you see how many people in Europe and the United States can understand the ancient Latin?
For the current network language flowers to attract the eye, constantly subverting the use of traditional Chinese characters, there is no need to panic, as a flood beast, as a living fossil of Chinese characters, not today only encountered a huge challenge, but Chinese characters stand up to now, has gone through countless history of washing and challenges. While the Internet has contributed a large number of new words and new texts, it has indeed led to great changes in Chinese in terms of style, style, texture, etc., but it also means that Chinese characters have ushered in an era of iterative update and phoenix nirvana. At present, the social hotspots are varied and updated in real time, how can we do it in order to always maintain the expressiveness and vitality of Chinese characters in the era of rapid flight and change, of course, we must keep pace with the times and run with the great era.
At the beginning of 2022, the National Library of China and the Reading Group launched the Oracle Promotion Public Welfare Project, so that the ancient Oracle CP is full of vitality online texts, so that the ancient characters containing the wisdom of the ancestors can go to the public in a vivid and interesting way, inheriting the past and opening up the future, and living forever, which is a good thing. Writing is the carrier of a civilization, and if it disappears, it will also dissipate. The ancients regarded the writing as a divine object, and they respected it very much, and even believed that the text hid the heavenly opportunity and destiny. Today, the Chinese civilization originally described by the oracle bone has indeed gone in the same vein to the 21st century and to the digital age, and the commonalization of language, the colloquialization of style, the simplification of Chinese characters, the alphabetization of Zhuyin, the digitization of communication, and the internationalization of terminology are the development paths of Chinese and Chinese dialects that lead to the future and the world.