His name was Liu Bannong, he had participated in the Xinhai Revolution, a pioneer of China's New Culture Movement, and a writer, linguist, and educator. He is also a professor at Peking University.
With the rise of the feminist movement in the 1920s, Liu Bannong invented a Chinese character specifically for women, but was scolded by women for many years.
Now many years later, the word has been widely used, and basically everyone can see this word every day.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, it was a climax of cultural exchanges between China and the West, and it was echoed by the New Culture Movement, the most typical representative of which was the Vernacular Movement. Wen yan wen was originally an ancient language, but the more later the future generations, the farther away the wen and the actual spoken language became, and it could no longer adapt to the development of society and language.
Since ancient times, the Chinese language on the mainland has been divided into "wen yan wen" and "vernacular", and wen yan is the official form of expression, the language and stylistic form of the Gongqing literati. Vernacular is the language used in the conversation of ordinary people.
In ancient times, the use of "literary language" and "vernacular" to express it was different.
For example, if you ask a person if they have eaten, the vernacular is: "Have you eaten?" ”
It's just that blunt.
However, the text is more concise: "Is it a meal?" ”
In September 1915, Chen Duxiu founded the "Youth Magazine" in Shanghai, which was later renamed "New Youth", and the New Culture Movement began.
This movement mainly vigorously attacked the dominance of long-standing feudal thought, awakened a generation of young people, advocated vernacular language, opposed literary language, advocated new literature, and opposed old literature.
Many linguists have contributed to the promotion of vernacular literature, including Liu Bannong.
Liu Bannong, born on May 29, 1891, died on July 14, 1934 in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, was a pioneer of the New Culture Movement in China, as well as a famous writer, linguist, and educator.
Born into a poor intellectual family, he was brilliant from an early age, and at the age of six, he was able to compose couplets and chant poems.
In 1907, he was admitted to Changzhou Fu Middle School and achieved excellent results.
In 1911, during the Xinhai Revolution, he rushed to Qingjiang to join the revolutionary army.
Later, in the sixth year of the Republic of China, in 1917, he went to Peking University as a professor of preparatory law and participated in the editorial work of New Youth Magazine.
In the campaign to promote vernacular literature, Liu Bannong created a Chinese character, but was scolded by women for many years, and this Chinese character is exactly the "she" we are familiar with.
In fact, this "she" character was not completely created by Liu Bannong, it had this word in ancient times, which belonged to the strange character, and the pronunciation at that time was jiě. It was not until the rise of the feminist movement in the 1920s that the sound tā appeared.
Before modern times, there was no tradition of distinguishing between male, female, and third-person singular pronouns.
Thousands of years later, no one seemed to think that there was a need to distinguish between male, female and third persons, until the rise of the vernacular movement, the gradual development of Western languages, especially English, this problem gradually emerged and became prominent.
In ancient Chinese, the third person who is the object is represented by the word "zigzag". Later, the vernacular language arose, using the word "he" as a third-person pronoun, which can be substituted for men, women and everything.
Before and after the May Fourth Movement, some literary works also used the word "Yi" to refer to women, such as Lu Xun's early works.
Later, Liu Bannong, who taught at Peking University, first proposed to use the word "she" to refer to a third-person woman.
Liu Bannong's proposal caused a sensation in the country for a time, and at that time, many people expressed different views on it.
Some people think that this proposition is very practical, so that it can be analyzed at a glance whether it is a man or a woman.
However, many feminists began to scold Liu Bannong, believing that since they paid attention to the equality of men and women, they could not be treated like this.
Why should the "she" that describes a woman be next to a female word, and the "he" that describes a man does not have to be next to a male word?
However, this phenomenon has only lasted for a few years.
Soon, the word "she" was recognized, praised, and widely used by the people, and this incident became a sensation in the cultural circles at that time.