Teacher, so preach and teach and solve doubts.
Since ancient times, teaching has been a respectable profession because he can lead students to open the door to knowledge, step into a rich and colorful world, and enrich and satisfy the students' spirit, so teachers are also called the engineers of the human soul.
As an ancient civilization with a long history of thousands of years, the mainland has had famous teachers in all dynasties, who have cultivated a lot of talents for the world, inspired many intelligent children, and made contributions to the continuation and development of Chinese civilization.
As a famous scholar and educator in the Song Dynasty, Zhu Xi also gave lectures and nurtured many children who were thirsty for knowledge, and he also had his own unique methods and experiences in teaching.
He once asked a tricky question to his students in class: Why is it called "buying things" instead of "buying north and south"?
After this question was asked, the students in the class were stumped, and no one answered for a long time, until a 10-year-old child stood up and broke the mystery in one sentence, which was praised by Zhu Xi.
How does he explain this?
Wonderful Chinese
In this world, there are countless human languages, and Chinese is very unique among them.
Belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family, Chinese is an isolated language that exhibits typical isolate characteristics in terms of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar, distinguishing it from Indo-European languages such as English, Russian and French.
The emergence of the Chinese language can even be traced back thousands of years, before the formal formation of Chinese civilization, it has begun to sprout so that people can communicate and communicate, so many Chinese language Xi also have a very long history.
Because language is highly arbitrary and conventional, the connection between the linguistic form of each word and the meaning it expresses is not natural, but prescribed and gradually formed by human Xi, so it is difficult to explain the origin of many linguistic forms over time.
Just like why we always say "buy things" in our lives, instead of "buying north and south", few people can explain the reason, but everyone knows that this thing should be expressed in the form of "buying things".
Even though there are hundreds of different regional dialects in China, and although there are differences in pronunciation, intonation and even vocabulary expressions, language expressions such as "shopping" are unified across the country, and everyone can understand them, and almost no one will raise objections to them.
So how many people have ever wondered why such expressions have become a uniform Xi of people?
Zhu Xi's question
Zhu Xi once asked the students this question in his class: Why is it called "buying things" and not "buying north and south"?
It was also very accidental that he would ask such a tricky question in class.
At that time, Zhu Xi was concentrating on lecturing to the students, but the students' attention was quickly attracted by a passing woman outside the window, and no one cared about what Zhu Xi said, so Zhu Xi, who was sitting on the pulpit, was very annoyed.
But Zhu Xi also understood that in such a situation, even if he continued to speak, the students' listening effect would be greatly reduced, so he simply asked the above question along the matter they were interested in and asked the students to answer it.
The woman was obviously going to the market to buy something with the basket in her hand, so the students were also attracted by Zhu Xi's question, and they began to think about why people said it was "buying things", but no one said "buying north and south"?
The noisy classroom soon fell into silence, and the students all seriously thought about the question raised by the teacher, but they did not come up with an answer for a long time.
After a while, a 10-year-old child timidly raised his hand, and Zhu Xi asked him to answer the question, and he stood up and said: "The 'thing' we usually talk about buying 'things' does not actually refer to a specific object, but a general statement, which is related to the traditional Five Elements Theory, because among the five elements, the east represents wood, the west represents gold, the south represents or, the north represents water, and the middle represents earth. Because the basket is made of wood, it burns when it encounters fire, and when it encounters water, it leaks out, and only gold and wood can be contained, so we say 'buy something'. ”
After listening to this child's answer, all the students in the class suddenly realized, Zhu Xi also praised this classmate with satisfaction, and the atmosphere of the classroom returned to the same as before.
The reason behind it
Although Zhu Xi praised the child's answer, and the whole class agreed with the answer, the child's statement was not actually the real answer.
Zhu Xi's original intention in raising this question was to redraw the students' attention to the classroom and arouse the students' thinking, and this child's answer was also carefully considered, sounded reasonable, and achieved his original purpose, so he did not delve into this question further.
In fact, many people believe that the term "buying things" has a lot to do with the ancient East and West cities, and in the urban planning at that time, the place of goods trading was the east and west cities in the city, which is also recorded in many ancient poems and ancient texts.
For example, in the folk song "Mulan Ci" of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, it was mentioned: the east market buys horses, and the west market buys saddles.
Therefore, many scholars believe that the so-called "east and west" concept actually evolved from the north and south cities, and this statement has also been recognized by many people.
However, in addition to this conjecture, there are many other different possibilities, such as the belief that the mainland has been trading with other countries since ancient times, and that the most contact with the East and the West is the east, so things evolved from this aspect.
Because language is arbitrary and conventional, and its development and evolution are also uneven and gradual, it is very difficult to capture, so the true origin of the term 'thing' has always been a matter of opinion, and it is difficult to find documents or classics to corroborate it.
Brief summary:
Language is a very magical phenomenon unique to human society, and it is also one of the important factors that distinguish humans from animals.
As one of the oldest languages in the world, Chinese has naturally gone through many different stages of development and change, and the different characteristics of each era have also left traces in the Chinese system, so language is also one of the witnesses of social development and progress.
Although it is difficult to explore the origin and roots of many expressions today, we can still capture the traces of culture that have been passed down since ancient times in the Chinese language used today, and clarify the context of the development of Chinese culture.