Chapter 451 (1/2)
Mrs. Larry picked up a branch and began to write and draw on the ground. She first wrote down some strange symbols, like a kind of text, which everyone couldn't understand. She writes very carefully, scribbling and changing while writing, as if primary school students were dictating words.
The soft mud ground was soon covered with a large area. Mrs. Larry stopped to wipe the sweat on her forehead, looked carefully again, and said, ”there should be no mistake. This is all the words I saw in the altar.”
”It's a bit like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,” said Su Huilan
”It's a bit like that,” said Mrs. Larry, ”I first saw similar symbols on the scepter of the savage patriarch and some pottery in his house. I thought of the relationship between our mission to South Taiping and the Egyptian pyramids. At that time, I thought it was a variant of ancient Egyptian characters. But because there were too few samples, I couldn't draw a clear conclusion. Until I saw these in the altar——
I can be sure that this is a very ancient writing, which is different from the ancient Egyptian priestly writing, but it must have their origin. Before Shang Boliang deciphered the Rosetta monument, the ancient Egyptian writing has always been regarded as a simple hieroglyphic, but now we all know that it has more phonetic parts than pictorial parts, so it is actually a kind of phonetic writing with some pictographs And ideographic functions.
Ideographic characters are easy to spread but not easy to record. Ideographic characters can express accurately and deeply with less words, but it also increases the difficulty of mastering it, so it is not conducive to wide dissemination among different classes and races.
However, almost all characters in the world begin with pictographic ideograph, and then combine with the local oral language to form phonetic characters. In the process of communication, the ideographic part of the characters will gradually lose its phonetic function, and evolve into different pronunciation and symbol combinations everywhere.
In addition to China, which has entered a highly developed agricultural civilization since a very early time, and has maintained a unified dynasty for thousands of years, without fundamental division of family and country and interruption of civilization, and can retain the complex character system of Chinese characters, which has become the only ancient characters used so far, no matter the holy characters of ancient Egypt, Sumerian cuneiform or Mayan characters They have disappeared. Even if they exist, from the situation of our decoding, they have already evolved into a phonetic text.
Linguistic circles have been looking for evidence of the evolution of Egyptian holy script. We guess that before it, there should be a more abundant hieroglyphic and ideographic characters similar to the Chinese character system, which gradually evolved into the later holy script. ”
”Could that be the evolution of Chinese characters?” interposed petru. He knew a little Chinese and agreed that Mrs. Larry's Chinese characters were the most complex characters in the world.
”No, it won't.” as Mrs. Larry's assistant, Alice also has considerable research on philology, ”There is no correlation between Chinese characters and holy script. Their structure and way of expressing meaning are completely different. Chinese characters are much more complex and ingenious than holy script. We should be glad that Chinese civilization has not been cut off. Otherwise, it will be more difficult to decipher Chinese characters than any password in the world.”
”Isn't there a Chinese proverb that says' truth is always the simplest thing '? Why are Chinese characters so complex? The heart of people who use such complex things must be very complex!” petru glanced at Aoki and suhuilan. ”If they were as simple, easy to learn and practical as English!”
”You think it's simple, but the Chinese don't necessarily think so!” Alice retorted. ”If Western civilization hadn't dominated the world since the industrial revolution, maybe we're all speaking Chinese now!”