In recent years, traversal works have become popular, and many friends often imagine themselves crossing into ancient life. Realistically, just talking about communication is a big problem. Looking at the obscure language in the ancient books, can we communicate with them in Mandarin? The answer is clearly no.
But in ancient times, how did people communicate?
The earliest Mandarin was "Yayan", which is commonly known as the official dialect.
Yayan, the name first appeared in the Analects. The Analects of Discourse says: "The Sons speak Yayan, and the Poems and Books are all Yayan. The meaning of this sentence is that Confucius said Yazheng when he read the poems and books and wrote praises. Confucius lectured in the country of Lu, and the "three thousand disciples and seventy-two sages" came from all directions, and their languages and pronunciations were different from each other, so Confucius had to lecture in Ya dialect in order for the listener to understand.
Yayan was formed in the Xia Dynasty, developed in the Shang Dynasty, and matured in the Zhou Dynasty. From the perspective of the history of language development, Yayan is the origin of the common language of our Han people, which not only sets a yardstick for the unification and standardization of the Chinese language, so that the development of the Chinese language has a solid foundation, but also has a profound impact on improving the cohesion of the Han nation and promoting the process of Han national civilization.
The common national language is the language commonly used within the nation for communication and is one of the main indicators of identifying an independent nation. It is formed on the basis of a dialect and is inseparable from economic, political, social, cultural and other factors.
Dialects, which are local branches of ethnic languages, are the languages spoken by people in local areas. In the process of development, Han society has experienced different degrees of differentiation and unification, thus gradually producing dialects of Chinese. The Chinese dialect is also called "local dialect". The formation of Chinese dialects is mainly related to geographical factors, such as rivers and lakes, mountains and transportation routes; some are related to historical factors, such as immigration, garrisons, administrative divisions, etc.
After the Qin Dynasty destroyed the Six Kingdoms, the writing was unified, and a unified written language was formed on the basis of the spoken language, that is, the wen yanwen. In the Han Dynasty, with the term "Tongyu", the "Dialects" compiled by Yangxiong of the Western Han Dynasty used the "Tongyu" at that time to explain the dialects of various places.
During the Sui and Tang dynasties, on the basis of the northern dialect, a written language close to the spoken language was produced- vernacular. The Han people have long used "Wen yan", which was initially based on spoken language, but later the gap with spoken language became farther and farther away, learning was difficult, and the number of users was very small. Thus the "vernacular" developed and gained the status of written language after the Song and Yuan dynasties. At the same time, literary works written in the vernacular appeared, such as Song and Yuan dialects and Ming and Qing novels. Although the language of these literary works is more or less local, in general, it basically belongs to the northern dialect, which greatly promotes the promotion of the northern dialect throughout the country.
The use of "official dialect" to refer to the unique discourse system of some officials was first circulated from the time of the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. In the sixth year of Yongzheng, a number of local officials from Guangdong and Fujian were summoned, but the Cantonese and Min languages of the southern officials obviously made the emperor unable to adapt, and after listening to a lengthy report, the Yongzheng Emperor still knew nothing. The emperor keenly found that if these officials were sent to govern the civil administration, the people would not even understand the language, let alone govern.
In addition, the superior and subordinate officials could not understand each other, which also provided countless opportunities for those officials to cheat from them. Therefore, the Yongzheng Emperor promulgated a rule: If you give birth to a child, you must learn the "official language" within eight years, otherwise you are not allowed to take the imperial examination. When doing official questioning, it is not allowed to use the vernacular vernacular. Since then, the "official dialect" with the aftersound of various local dialects has become a unique landscape in the official arena. Ordinary people also refer to this unique discourse system of officials as "playing official style." At first, this kind of speech could only be used in the official field, so it was called "official language". Later, more and more people could speak official dialects, saying that official dialects were inappropriate, and in the early years of the Republic of China, there was a new name: Chinese.
The term "Mandarin" in modern times was first proposed by Zhu Wenxiong, a scholar who studied the phonetic characters, in 1906. In his book "Jiangsu New Alphabet", he divided Chinese into "Guowen" (文言文), "Mandarin" and "Colloquialism" (dialect), and he not only proposed the name of "Putonghua", but also clearly defined "Putonghua": "The words commonly used in the provinces." ”
At the "National Conference on Character Reform" held in 1955, Zhang Xiruo said in the theme report of the conference: "In order to highlight that we are a multi-ethnic family and to highlight the equality of the languages and scripts of our various ethnic groups, after in-depth study, it was decided not to adopt the name Chinese. If you call Chinese, you are afraid that you will be misunderstood as putting the Chinese language above other ethnic groups in the country. ”
After research, it was finally decided to be called Mandarin.
In 1956, the State Council issued a directive on the promotion of Putonghua, adding the definition of Putonghua to "a common language of the modern Han nationality with Beijing pronunciation as the standard tone, northern dialect as the basic dialect, and exemplary modern vernacular works as the grammatical norm." This definition clearly stipulates the standards of Putonghua from the three aspects of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, making the definition of Putonghua more scientific and more thorough.
Among them, the meaning of the three words "Mandarin" is "universal" and "common". The term "Mandarin" began to be widely used with clear connotations. The grammar of Mandarin is regulated by the famous modern vernacular works of Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Bing Xin, Ye Shengtao, and others, and must also be "general use cases" in these modern vernacular texts. At present, Mandarin is based on the Modern Chinese Dictionary.
For decades, the promotion of Mandarin has been remarkable. More and more people in the country can understand and speak Mandarin, and the quality of Mandarin in the media is getting higher and higher. Of course, promoting Mandarin is not the same as eliminating dialects. The protection of dialects and minority languages has always been an important principle for the state to promote Mandarin.