“The Qin province of Chang Yi Zezhou has given Qin more than Zhao Qin to follow the river.” I’m sorry.
Can you believe it? It’s not really a bunch of hypes, it’s a poem called “The Cross.”
However, the poem was written in Chudji’s ancient language, and the Chinese word only served to mark the pronunciation, so it became this.
If translated into Chinese, this is the case:
“What a night it is this morning, and it flows in.
And what day shall this day be with the prince?
Shame is good, not shame.
And his heart was not disheartened, but he knew the prince.
And on the mountains are wood and branches, and their hearts are pleased that they know not. I’m sorry.
Legend has it that this is a poem that was recited by a Vietnamese boatman during the war state when he expressed his affection to the princes of Chu.
In the early years of the Qin era, Chinese people in the south continued to use “brain languages” other than Chinese, which had disappeared from the long rivers of history as a result of the evolution of Qin Han Wei Jin-North towards the millennium.
What was the process of assimilation of Chinese in southern China? What is the lingua franca? These issues are difficult to judge for today’s scholars. It is very difficult to restore the full picture of a lost language that belongs to the “dominant” simply by the words of history.
But it is known that language, as a vehicle of information, is also one of the battlegrounds of the rulers and the governed.
The great game of the spoken world.
The rural areas of the ancient world were the dominant, with the majority of the population illiterate and the transmission of information dependent on spoken language. At the bottom of the spectrum, there is a lack of documentation, often of information from the ruling elite.
This situation poses great difficulties for those who study “linguistic assimilation ” , as modern people are unable to infer directly by writing the assimilation of language.
In the ancient Korean peninsula, for example, most local writings are written in Chinese, but ordinary people on the peninsula do not speak Chinese. The Chinese-speaking intellectuals also tend to read and write only and cannot communicate in spoken language. This separation of words from spoken languages is widespread throughout the world.
And unlike modern nation States, ancient rulers do not seek linguistic unity and standardization. After all, there was no linguistic or radio in ancient times, and the idea of linguistic unity clearly went beyond the realm of perception and was not technically feasible.
For ancient rulers, a State is sufficient as long as the elite can use a common written language.
Thus, the ancient rulers often suffer from headaches that they cannot understand the official’s dialect in the halls. Even if both parties try to speak one language, they sometimes encounter difficulties.
In the 8th century, for example, I met the missionary Saint-Buniface from England, born in Rome, in the third century, but both spoke in Latin. This underscores the importance of ancient written communications.
So the Chinese dynasty has always emphasized “Yahoo” — the ancient Mandarin — that important officials must be in possession. However, even so, the Emperors of the two Koreas often rely on interpreters to communicate with officials.
Until the end of the day, the Emperor and the Cantonese were barely able to communicate.
Nationalism, identity politics, all these things came out of 1750. Until then, the rulers had never wished to promote oral language, and even if there had been such an attempt, it would have been difficult to be too effective.
This inertia lasted until the 19th century. The industrial revolution had brought about great breakthroughs in the fields of transport, communications, the media and education, while language had become a central symbol of nationalism, and countries had begun to take the initiative to promote linguistic assimilation, with great success.
The problem is that linguistic assimilation took place long before the nineteenth century, until the ruler consciously promoted the language.
This means that focusing only on the linguistic policy of the rulers is, in fact, an act of monogamy. The right idea is to see from the perspective of the general public, to understand the basic patterns of linguistic assimilation, and to add language policies that have emerged recently as an additional variable.
Therefore, to understand how the governed begins to speak the language of the rulers, it is first necessary to understand their living environment, political system, psychological motivation from the perspective of the governed.
As the most powerful colonial empire in the classical world, Rome left behind many Roman languages (descendants of Latin). Interestingly, ancient Rome has not actively promoted Latin. Language assimilation is a natural change in Western colonial societies.
A slow kiss: an assimilation of ancient languages
At the beginning of the fourth century, in order to escape the fighting in the north, the Chinese royal family and a group of members of the Swiss community fled to the south of the Yangtze and established the Eastern Dynasty.
At that time, those who left their homes found themselves, in a bleak state, surrounded by a large number of subjects who did not understand the language, everything was so strange.
As stated in the book of Wei, the south, which is controlled by Dong-jin, is full of people like Ba, Shu, Yan, Chu, and Viet, “birds, birds, mouths, monkeys, snakes, fish, and all kinds of people.” China’s colonization of the South began a thousand years ago, and the conquest of hundreds of Viet Nam has been nearly 500 years.
However, up to this point, the Chinese language is still the same as a chain of “black” languages.
The Roman Empire faced a similar situation during the same period. Latin has taken root in the western part of the Empire for more than 400 years and remains under-represented in rural areas.
And also as a classical empire, Rome and the Han Dynasty have very similar “linguistic policies” — there is little language policy.
An ancient society was based on the dissemination of spoken language, which was nothing more than a game of a few cities and elite cultures, with large rural areas full of illiteracy. The ruler ‘ s culture is highly reliant on written language and is highly confined to political centres, making the penetration of languages into rural areas very difficult and slow.
Fortunately, one group of people is always happy to embrace the culture of the rulers, who are local elites.
In order to pursue political status in the new order, the elites always quickly began to learn the colonial language, first in writing and then in spoken language. However, local elites who learned the new language did not immediately abandon their mother tongues, which were bilingual users for many generations.
In many cases, because of the weakness of indigenous languages, their mother tongues are not written, creating the illusion of “quick assimilation of the elite” in the eyes of future generations. In fact, bilingual use lasts a long time.
Saint Augustine, who lived in Rome in the fifth century, was a typical bilingual user, as a member of the Berber nobles, whose family had for many generations adopted Latin as a first foreign language in order to participate in the political activities of the empire, yet they had never given up their mother tongue. Until late, St. Augustine groaned and said that, no matter how ferocious his Latin language was, he would be mocked by those terrible Italians.
Since when, then, have these bilinguals completely shifted to new languages? This problem is difficult to prove, as written documentation does not reflect changes at the oral level. Another important element that works is integration.
However, linguistic assimilation has never been one-way.
While powerful languages “incorporate” vulnerable languages, they must leave their own shadows in the new language, sometimes a vocabulary and sometimes a voice. This integration has made the process of transformation of bilingual users more confusing.
If immigrants and local elites are ships of language, the army and the church are the bridges of language.
In some ancient countries, the army was composed mainly of nobles, while in others there was a shadow of universal military service, but either could accelerate the penetration of the ruler ‘ s language into ordinary farmers. As for ancient religious organizations, they are the main vehicles of cultural education activities, and the dissemination of spoken language is often facilitated by the teachings who have received written language training. In fact, after the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the main push for the continued spread of Latin-Roman into rural areas over the next few centuries was the Christian Church.
In an ancient world where all the rhythms are slow, “linguistic assimilation” often takes centuries to come to an end, and in many cases it simply cannot be achieved.
The popularization of Latin-Roman in the western part of the Roman Empire took five or six centuries, and little progress has been made in the long east.
It was not until Tang Dynasty was settled in the south of China, where Chinese is commonly spoken in Chinese.
In the Islamic world, the Arabic language has been assimilating Syria for more than a hundred years (provided that Arabic and local amphibious languages are highly similar and can almost be replaced by words), and Egypt has been assimilated for about 400 years, and Iran has simply failed.
In the tenacity of North Africa, Latin did not reach the countryside during the 500 years of the Roman Empire’s rule, and in the previous 300 years the Arabic language had faced similar conditions, and it had taken another five or six centuries to turn it into a “minority language” since the beginning of the millennium.
As for North Korea and Viet Nam, although locals have used Chinese for millennia, they still do not have a general acceptance of Chinese in their daily lives, which also bodes well for the process of “go to Hanwen” after the nineteenth century. Outside the imperial borders, the power of linguistic assimilation is always weaker.
When the age of great navigation came, the basic norms of the ancient world had not changed as a result of the rise of contemporary colonialism, the Spanish Empire being the most typical example.
In Western America, rulers have concluded that the spread of Spanish to indigenous peoples is impossible. Western American grass-roots rulers, i.e. priests, learn the native language.
The Catholic Grand Duke of Trent, which ended in 1563, further prohibited priests from preaching to indigenous peoples in Latin or Spanish, because it would “dissociate from the masses”.
Thus, in the course of 300 years of colonization, Spanish was confined to cities and a few large estates in the Americas, making access to rural areas difficult. With the exception of European immigrants, the majority of knowledge of Spanish is mixed, black slaves and indigenous nobility (who are bilingual users).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the countries of Latin America became independent, the Indians, who made up more than half of the population of the Spanish-speaking Americas, still did not speak Spanish (read and write). At the same time, the Quechua and Navarre languages, among others, were promoted to a greater extent during the Spanish colonial period.
In this sense, the Western American Empire is, in fact, the post-Aztek-Inca Empire, and, in terms of language policy, it is indeed a classical empire of no use.
Today’s Berber distribution. The Berbers of North Africa have historically been known for their resistance to assimilation, and the assimilation of the Berber language in Arabic has taken seven or eight centuries. Like many ancient peoples, the Berbers ‘ vulnerability lies in their division and lack of a unified political entity. In the end, foreign languages surrounded by the Berber language on the island made a breakthrough with political and economic cultural advantages.
When the monarchy embraces the embrace: the linguistic assimilation of the modern nation
King Louis XIV of France received a report from the eastern border in the second half of the 17th century, the winner of 30 years of war. The report recommended that French should be enforced in the newly conquered area of Alsace-Lorin, and that German should be banned, as the local population “still carved in its heart the eagle of the Empire”.
At the same time, another great winner of the 30-year war, King Carl XII of Sweden, faced a similar situation. Sweden ‘ s newly conquered province of Skinner belonged to Denmark for generations, where Sweden was determined to promote the Swedish language in order to break the Skinners ‘ loyalty to Denmark.
In the 17th century, modern language policy finally emerged. However, the compulsory promotion of languages during this period does not include nationalist claims.
In the first two cases, for example, France and Sweden initiated linguistic assimilation because of the linguistic ties between the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark, their enemies, and these newly conquered provinces. Where such links do not exist, such as Brittany in France or Lapland in Sweden, the Government still lacks interest in promoting the official language. Until around 1750, many countries in Europe began to promote the official language for administrative purposes, such as the French language in Austrian-Needland and the Spanish language in Western America, but these actions were also lacking in nationalist motivation and generally had little effect.
The French Revolution that broke out in 1789 was a precursor to linguistic nationalism. For the first time, “a nation, a people, a language” became an iron proposition. The rapid rise of nationalism and the unprecedented status of languages in history were driven by the industrialization of the century, which quickly became one of the core symbols of the nation. It was not until then that the nation State launched all its political machinery and vigorously accelerated the process of linguistic assimilation.
At the end of the 18th century, when the French Revolution began, only 10% of the people in all France were able to use the French dialect. Almost all people will be in French by the end of the 20th century. But at least 40 per cent of the people at that time were still bilingual users, and they still spoke dialects, not standard languages, at home.
Some 18 million Italians are American today. The Italian community attached more importance to traditional identity, and many young Italians were specializing in Italian to keep their ancestors alive. In fact, when their ancestors emigrated to the United States, none of them spoke standard Italian, but Sicilian, Naples, Venice…
When Italy was reunited in 1861, it was estimated that only 2.5 per cent of the population spoke Tuscanian dialects. This language has been the common language of the Italian cultural class since the Renaissance of the 15th century, but after 4500 years it is still a minority of elite languages that have little to do with muddy legs.
France, as well as Italy, did not begin to promote linguistic assimilation until the nation State had been established. In the final analysis, however, has language policy changed the basic pattern of linguistic assimilation? The answer is no.
It remains a proliferation path from elite to civilian, from urban to rural; long-term bilingualism remains; and a large number of linguistic mixing remains.
The only effect of policy is to accelerate.
Radio broadcasting, railways, universal military service and compulsory education have led to dramatic changes. The caricature of Tintin can go to the Congo not far, and black-skinned children count in French, telling them that our country is Belgium.
In just a few decades, the United States military administration replaced, in English, the Spanish language, which had developed in the Philippines for more than three centuries but remained unstable.
The English-Indian and French-West African elites have a widespread mastery of the dominant language, and Naibal and Senghor became famous Western European language writers for the twentieth century.
The Siberian railway brought Russian to Central Asia and the Far East. After Hokkaido was taken care of, Japan considered turning Taiwan into the fifth great Japanese-speaking island …
Imperialism and nationalism are two sides of a coin, and it is it that initiates the linguistic assimilation movement and it is it that resists the linguistic assimilation movement. The intrinsic logic of linguistic assimilation is therefore contradictory. The power of the assimilation of modern languages is not as powerful as many people think — bilingualism is still widespread, and assimilation remains the norm at the city and elite levels.
The assimilation of colonial languages has won only in the “New World” – the Americas and Oceania – but it is based on the premise of a sharp decline in the indigenous population, and it has taken centuries in more indigenous areas, such as Peru, Mexico, and some of the island countries in the Pacific, to say the least.
In 1873, when Dodd wrote the last lesson, he probably failed to notice that most Alsaces’ mother tongue was still the local language, not the voice of Paris, because of the threat to French in the Alsace-Lorin region.
Just as he overestimated the effect of French language policy over the past 200 years, he overstated the implications of German language policy – – In fact, in many areas, such as languages, nation States and colonial empires are far from fully versed.
It is difficult to say whether it is a blessing or a misfortune for Duddé to fail to realize that.
Ding Ding in the Congo – the last lesson of Belgian imperialism. The policy of linguistic assimilation by the European colonial empire in Africa has largely stopped at the elite level. Newly independent African nation-States often also support the localization of colonial languages, such as Nigerian English and Angolan Portuguese. Language assimilation is never a one-way conquest.
Record number: YXA1pJ1EpevHA348Q5mC5E5D
I don’t know.
Keep your eyes on the road.
