Regarding this topic, Guo Kang actually has nothing to do.
In other words, at this point, the theory itself is no longer just a linguistic theoretical controversy, but has been linked to other issues - such as the understanding of civilization, the cultural policy of the Purple Horde Khanate, and the revision of the This will always be the way of thinking.
Guo Kang has never wanted to care about this. In fact, there is no standard answer to this kind of thing. He himself often doesn't know whether future experience is correct.
Moreover, this thing has a "self-proof" problem: for example, if when the account was first established, it was announced that the languages spoken in various places were Roman dialects, everyone could easily find various differences to refute this theory.
However, the Purple Horde Khanate has been conducting enlightenment education based on this theory for decades. As a result, now, at least in the Romanian region in a broad sense, all languages can indeed be regarded as dialects.
Because language changes very quickly. If a language is artificially determined and then we look for differences, or even deliberately create differences, it will be easy to separate. On the contrary, although some neighboring areas speak somewhat different words, they are not completely incomprehensible. With a little standardization and asking everyone to change a few common words and pronunciations, the gap can be significantly narrowed.
Therefore, Guo Kang feels that this kind of thing is a political issue. In particular, the status of Chinese in the Purple Horde Khanate is whether it is an "official document language" similar to Latin in the West. This is a matter of definition.
Moreover, the current discussion in the Purple Horde Khanate can be considered a relatively "serious" discussion. You know, in some cases, the development of things can even be attributed to more ridiculous factors.
In Guo Kang's time, Chinese had experienced the "separation of literature and white." But this process is not as simple as it sounds, but is filled with all kinds of intentional or unintentional misinterpretations, taken-for-granted assumptions, and crude and violent arguments.
The first person to formally propose this concept was Hu Shi, a famous master figure during the Republic of China. The source of his theory is very simple and straightforward: Europeans replaced dead languages like Latin with spoken languages from various places, so China should also use colloquial "living writing", that is, vernacular, to replace "dead languages" of classical Chinese.
It is easy to see that in this theory, classical Chinese and Latin play corresponding roles.
However, European missionaries had long had different opinions. In their view, Chinese characters as a whole correspond to Latin. They believe that in East Asia, Chinese characters are actually an "international language" equivalent to Latin, whether it is classical Chinese or vernacular. People from many other countries can write Chinese characters even if they cannot speak them, and even communicate with each other directly through Chinese characters. This is an obvious example.
Therefore, in the view of European scholars, both classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese belong to the category of "lingua franca", a "sacred silent language" that maintains a huge empire. The dialects from various places correspond to the local spoken languages in Europe.
Similarly, in the discourse of the literati of the Republic of China, although vernacular is called a lower-class, informal language, its history is not short and its cultural accumulation is also very rich. Hu Shi himself later admitted that their impact on vernacular literature was far inferior to that of Dante and Boccaccio to Italian, or to Shakespeare's role in English, let alone the status of the latter few who founded sects.
From this perspective, the results of the New Culture Movement were completely different from those of European cultural movements.
This is actually what inspires Guo Kang the most: Although Chinese is closely related to the military now, even if it is demilitarized and popularized, this vernacular Roman Chinese character system can still be continued.
Of course, throughout the New Culture Movement, there were actually similar European attempts. Some literati tried to use Chinese characters as phonetic symbols to write dialect literature. For example, Xu Zhimo wrote poems in Wu language recorded in Chinese characters.
This usage is probably similar to what the ancient Egyptians did for a while, using words as phonetic symbols, so it’s not impossible. However, there were not many attempts in this area even at that time. Although he received strong support from Hu Shi, he was not well-known in later generations.
As for why Hu Shi himself didn't study this kind of real "local writing" and didn't notice its contradictions with vernacular writing, the result may be simple - he didn't know how to...
Moreover, this is not the only thing that is "won't". The reason why local oral writing in Europe is important is that it is closely linked to politics and national construction. In the narratives of various European countries, the process of modern enlightenment is the process of the disintegration of classical and medieval empires. As the old empires collapsed, the lingua franca also died. Emerging countries have built a set of spoken and written languages based on local spoken languages as one of the foundations of nation-states.
In the eyes of later generations of scholars, Hu Shi did not understand the actual significance of this kind of oral writing. His theory is also very rigid, because he always focuses on writing, not pronunciation. Not only is this not part of the nation-state model, but it is exactly the kind of "imperial tradition" that he fiercely criticizes.
To give a hard analogy, Latin was finally abolished in various European countries, and as a result, French began to be popularized in various countries. Before the Enlightenment, everyone spoke Common Tongue; after the Enlightenment, everyone spoke another form of Common Tongue. After all the fuss, we still haven't been able to establish an independent writing system for each region. Isn't this a waste of enlightenment?
This issue was also pointed out by someone at the time, but Hu Shi only half understood it and did not take any substantive measures. It wasn't until the early 1950s that he realized...
Similarly, Hu Shi and others believed at the time that vernacular writing and pinyinization of Chinese characters were not contradictory but had a sequential relationship, so both were advocated by them. However, judging from European experience, if the vernacular is promoted and spoken language is brought closer to written language, the ecological niche of pinyinization will actually be occupied.
In addition, France has proven that modern countries have the ability to unify spoken language. This vernacular and corresponding spoken language will naturally replace local writing. If these two views are mentioned together, don't they contradict each other?
For this problem, the masters of the Republic of China also did not propose any feasible solution. What was finally realized was the rapid expansion of vernacular Chinese and the corresponding standard spoken language, cutting off the possibility of other routes, and even romanized pinyin was reduced to an auxiliary tool. So much so that until a hundred years later, Europeans still believed that Seris had inherited more of the legacy of ancient empires, rather than becoming a standard nation-state like the Balkans.
It stands to reason that many of these people have experience studying abroad, but I don’t know what they learned in the end...
So I can only say that sometimes the choice of path may be very simple, as long as the masters are good enough, it can be achieved. History can sometimes make people laugh or cry so hard. How can we explain it...
(End of chapter)
