laitimes

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

author:Popular Science China

Looking back at the past 2023, there are really a lot of major events in the world. Today I want to talk to you about a major event in the field of emojis, that is, the "Mo" emoji is popular all over the Internet, and there are many WeChat groups that are clicked, just like going to Huaguo Mountain.

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

"Mo" is the name of "monkey" in many dialects in the south, it is a phonetic word, and it is also written as "Ma Liu", "Ma Liu", "Monkey" or something in the literature. There is a word for agility in Mandarin called "Mali", which is pronounced "Mali" in many dialects, which is actually a derivative of "Maliu". After all, when it comes to agility, who can compare to Brother Monkey?

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, "Ma Slip" was also the name of a small boat. The picture is from the seventh volume of the "Continuation of the Huaiguan Tongzhi", engraved in the twenty-first year of Jiaqing.

This "Maliu" is not a new word, and it has been popular since the Northern Song Dynasty about a thousand years ago. This word looks very simple, but when it comes to its origin, experts have never understood it from the Song Dynasty to the present.

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

The picture comes from Shidetang's book "Journey to the West", photocopied from "Ming and Qing Rare Book Novel Series".

Playing monkeys set up stalls and writing poems to give away champions

The capital of the Northern Song Dynasty was Bianjing, which is the modern Kaifeng of Henan. According to the Northern Song Dynasty scholar Ruan Yue's "Poetry and Words of the Turtle Qianji" volume 40 "Witty Shang" quoted from the book "Miscellaneous Records of Tired Travel", there was a kind of monkey play in Bianjing at that time, that is, a large number of messy things were placed on the ground, and then the monkey would pick up which thing by calling the name of the thing. If the monkey gets it right, the monkey trickster will praise it: "Yes, Maliu!"

着 (zháo) means "hit, reach", and "Maliu" is of course a monkey.

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

"Four Serials" photocopied the Ming Dynasty Moon Window Taoist book "Poetry and Turtle" book shadow.

In the imperial examination in the third year of Xining in the Northern Song Dynasty (1070), a person named Ye Zuqia jumped from the fifth class to the champion of the year by patting the emperor and the court. Some candidates who did not win the examination gave the champion a poem:

着甚来由去赏春,

You should also be intentional about cherishing Fangchen.

Don't trample the horseshoe and break the flowers,

Stay with the sorrowful to be drunk.

On the surface, this poem is begging for the great champion: You can look at it when you are "proud of the spring breeze", we losers are hiding on the lawn and drinking alcohol, please don't trample the lawn! But there is a mystery in the poem: it is a hidden poem. Connecting the first word of each sentence, it is the one we just saw: "Yes, Maliu!" You see, this person is a big monkey who scolds the champion like what that person is referring to!

After listening to the story, let's analyze it from a linguistic perspective. In addition to telling us that the term "Maliu" was produced no later than the third year of Xining in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, the story also tells us about the place where it was popular. Today's "Mo" is a southern dialect, but if you take a closer look, the story can emphasize that the shouting comes from "Jingshi", which is the authentic Henan dialect.

Coincidentally. Hu Zai (zǐ), a scholar who lived during the period of the Two Song Dynasty, quoted the Tongjiang Poems in his book "Tiaoxi Yuyin Conghua" volume 55 "Miscellaneous Notes of the Song Dynasty", saying that also in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, in Dongping County, Shandong, there was a group of people who gave people nicknames. There is a big official named Lu Huiqing, who is thin and moves a lot of hands when he speaks, so this group of people called him "Famaliu".

"Dharma" means to speak the Dharma. At that time, there was a group of people who went around telling Buddhist stories to promote Buddhism, and in order to attract the attention of passers-by, they had a loud voice and many movements, which was one of the predecessors of the storytellers later. Those Dongping people said that Lu Huiqing was the "Ma Liu" who "said", which made Lu Huiqing angry.

Judging from these two accounts, "Maliu" was originally a northerner term.

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

In the early Southern Song Dynasty, an important rhyme book "Increasing and Repairing the Rhyme of the Ritual Department" (Ming Foot).

So where does the word "Maliu" come from? In fact, the views of the ancients are no longer consistent.

Hypothesis 1

The southern expedition of the army is full of momentum, and suddenly becomes a monkey and who is crying?

According to the "Yu Yi Period Notes" of the Eastern Jin Dynasty quoted in the "Notes on the Book of Water" volume 36 "Wen Shui", the Eastern Han Dynasty general Fubo Ma left a small garrison when he aided the southern expedition, and they all gave them the surname Ma.

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

"The First Edition of the Four Serials" photocopied the Wuyingdian Juzhen edition of the "Water Scripture Note".

In the centuries that followed, the story was told countless times. In these retellings, the number of "Ma Liuren" has not changed (it can be seen that these records are most likely copied from the "Yu Yi Period Notes", and the recorder himself did not investigate this group of people at all), but there are a lot more other condiments in the story. For example, in "The New Tang Dynasty Book: The Biography of the Southern Barbarians", in which "Maliu people" are written as "Maliu people", and they are especially fond of fighting, and the local area is also rich in "orangutan beasts".

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

The book shadow of the "New Tang Dynasty Book" of the ancient pavilion.

In the Song Dynasty, after the word "Maliu" referring to monkeys appeared, some scholars thought of the "Maliu people" in the literature. For example, on the occasion of the Two Song Dynasty, the "Shaw Brothers Heard and Saw the Later Record" said: "Maliu people" look like monkeys, so "Maliu" is used as a metaphor for monkeys. Zhao Yanwei of the Southern Song Dynasty said in "Yunlu Man's Banknote", "The proverb of the northerners says that Husun is 'Ma Liu'", this is because the "Ma Liu people" speak in a very strange voice and sound like a monkey.

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

"The first compilation of the book series" photocopied the book shadow of "Shijian Zi Lao" and "Yunlu Manjian".

However, the Maliu people (or Maliu people) were only a small group of 200 households at best, and it is difficult to say whether they still existed independently after the Jin Dynasty. Even if this ethnic group still existed in the Song Dynasty, the people who lived in Henan and Shandong at that time must not be very familiar with this group of people. Why did the northerners choose such a distant and unfamiliar ethnic group as a metaphor for the common monkey? Therefore, later scholars generally felt that this hypothesis was just the brain hole of the ancients, and no one believed it.

Hypothesis 2

Jumping around the little monkey, staying in the stable "Bi Ma Plague"

The ancients believed that if the monkey and the horse were kept together, the horse would not be less susceptible to illness. Jia Siyi's "Qi Min Yao Shu" volume 6 quotes "Shu" in the Northern Wei Dynasty and says that horse breeders: "Often tied to macaques in the horse workshop, so that the horse is not afraid, ward off evil, and eliminate all kinds of diseases." A large number of commonly used ancient books, including the Compendium of Materia Medica, have quoted or paraphrased similar statements. Mingren Xie Xuan's "Five Miscellaneous Tactics: The Ministry of Things" even said clearly: "Put the snipe in the stable, so that the horse is not plagued." "Journey to the West" said that the Emperor of Heaven named Sun Xing as Bi Ma Wen, and he also made jokes. ”

The "emoji" that was put on the altar by young people, why is it a monkey?

Among the Han Dynasty portrait bricks are some scenes of monkeys in the stables.

According to Li Shizhen, "Maliu" is "an animal left in the stable", that is, a monkey. This hypothesis avoids doubts about geographical location, but it has its own problems: if the ancients wanted to use two words to express the meaning of "animals kept in stables", they would most likely use the expressions "stable beasts", "horses", "horse doctors", or so on. Moreover, if the name "Maliu" really comes from this legend, then the name can quickly become popular, which shows that the reason for this word formation is well known. However, those scholars in the Song Dynasty who were familiar with the history of the literature gave an "erroneous" explanation, which doesn't make sense, right? Therefore, in modern times, Li Shizhen's view has not been widely recognized.

Hypothesis 3

I can't figure it out to blame "Maliu", and I ask for ancient pronunciation and foreign language

The origin of "Maliu" is so mysterious that modern scholars have begun to wonder if it could have come from an archaic or foreign language. For example, the famous linguist Zheng Zhang Shangfang in his academic masterpiece "Ancient Phonology" in the ancient Chinese "猱" (náo) foley as *ml ́u: (the asterisk indicates that the sound behind it is the ancient sound speculated and constructed by modern experts, the same below), which sounds a bit similar to the modern "?", and another scholar, Pan Wuyun, in the book "Chinese Historical Phonology", even conceived the ancient sound of "猱" as a multi-syllable *malu, which is close to "?". However, how the ancient pronunciation generally refers to the pronunciation before the Six Dynasties needs to be explained how it is related to the "Maliu" record that only appeared in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty.

Let's look at foreign languages. Wang Xiaodun's "Research on Early Chinese Thought and Symbols" proposes that in the southern Dongtai language, many languages call "monkey" similar to the ancient construction of "monkey" by Zheng Zhang Shangfang and Pan Wuyun, for example, the "monkey" in "Wu Pan Zhuang" is called ma4lau2, and the "monkey" in the gelao language is called mu6lau2, which is similar to "mo". However, the "Maliu" mentioned in the Song Dynasty documents is probably the dialect of the Yulu region at that time. If it is related to the Dongtai language, further explanations are also required.

In addition, Husle's article "Etymology of "Ma Liu" suggests that it may come from the Jurchen word *monio, which means monkey. However, in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, the Jurchens had not yet risen, and it was difficult for its language to influence the hinterland of the Liao Dynasty, let alone enter the distant Northern Song Dynasty. What's more, according to the general understanding of modern academic circles, the Song pronunciation of "horse" is likely to be different from mo if the tone is not counted, and the Song pronunciation of "liu" is even more different from nio......

In addition to the above three types of doctrines, experts have also raised several different possibilities, but they also have their own problems. To this day, the academic community still cannot determine the etymology of "Mariu".

Planning and production

This article is a work of popular science China-Star Project

Produced by the Department of Science and Technology of the China Association for Science and Technology

Producer: China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Galaxy Culture Media Co., Ltd

Author丨Cleaner Ph.D. student at Nankai University

Audit丨Liu Yun is a professor at the School of Chinese, University of International Business and Economics

Wang Hongzhi is an associate professor at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Normal University

Planning丨Xu Lai

Read on