Knowledgeable language and history come in! Features of historical linguistics

Take a look at the history of the development of Chinese and Japanese characters:

In the beginning, Japan did not have its own written language. During the Sui Dynasty, China was strong, and Japan sent envoys to the Sui Dynasty and some monks who studied abroad, and they brought Chinese writing to Japan and took root. Chinese became the imperial language of the Japanese imperial court, and it was only learned and used by the imperial family and noble officials.

During the Tang Dynasty, it continued to send envoys to the Tang Dynasty. At this time, the Japanese also created their own characters hiragana and katakana based on Chinese characters. Hiragana is derived from the cursive script of the Chinese script, and katakana is derived from the side of the Chinese character in italics.

At this time, there were several pronunciations of Japanese in Wu, Tang, and Han. Therefore, there are some words in modern Japanese that have more than one pronunciation. This is the result of the introduction of different pronunciations through the cultural exchange between Japan and China.

During the Heian period, kanji was still the main form of writing in the imperial court, but the female officials in the palace used hiragana due to their cultural influence, and hiragana at this time was called "female hand". At this time, women's literature was very developed, and several outstanding female writers were produced. Due to the weakening of China at the end of the Tang Dynasty, Sugawara Michizane abolished the dispatch of Tang envoys.

Japan has entered the period of prosperity of "national studies" from the prosperity of Sinology in the previous period, which is called the "dark period of national studies", and has entered the prosperous period of "national studies" that Japan has traditionally experienced. Chinese characters began to decline. Hiragana gradually became the dominant script used in Japan.

After hundreds of years of samurai feudalism, the Meiji Restoration. Many of these foreign words are represented by katakana when introduced into Europe and the United States in relation to science. Scientific and political developments led to the use of kanji in Japan to create some unique names, as well as some "national characters".

Many of the words related to politics and physical sciences in China were introduced from Japan and are actually foreign words.

If you don't have any knowledge of Japanese, as long as you really want to learn it, you can study it seriously and be self-taught. The key is to have perseverance.

I think Japan is the place where traditional Chinese culture has been preserved most completely, except for Taiwan. It can be said that Japan has absorbed the essence of Chinese culture and discarded the dross. In the initial stage of Chinese culture, there was little dross, and it was the culture they absorbed at that time.

The Japanese language is divided into hiragana, which was created based on the cursive script of kanji, and katakana, which was created based on the kanji regular script. When creating Japanese characters, it is inevitable to borrow some pronunciations from Chinese characters. Therefore, there are two pronunciations in Japanese: pronunciation and pronunciation.

The pronunciation is the original pronunciation of kanji (of course, it is not the same as our current pronunciation), and the pronunciation is the original pronunciation of Japan.

After modern times, Japan learned from the West in an all-round way, and used katakana to denote something that Japan did not have, that is, loanwords. Of course, the original Chinese characters will also be used to represent foreign things, and then we will talk about these nouns and use them in Chinese. For example, the words "economy", "cadre", and "procedure" are all from Japanese.

Chinese word order is generally subject-verb-object, while Japanese is subject-object-predicate.

As for the culture, the common denominator is that they are all Confucian cultures, and there are many differences. First of all, Japan's Confucian culture is different from ours, and Japan is more Westernized than ours.

Self-taught Japanese is fine, but it depends on your language talent and your level of effort. It is best to study Japanese at a university.

If you can't study on your own, you can find a Japanese teacher to teach you, or go to a bookstore or go online to find some knowledge about Japanese culture.

In the Tang and Song dynasties, Japan learned a part of Han culture, and then Japanized what they learned, and embarked on a completely different path from Chinese culture.

Their culture is cherry blossom culture, and the history and culture of China are fundamentally different.

China's culture is vast and profound.

You don't know Japanese culture at all.

You don't know Chinese culture either.

It is recommended that you read the hundred schools of pre-Qin first

Descriptive linguistics is the opposite of historical linguistics, that is, intercepting the language of a certain historical stage, observing, descripting, analyzing, and studying its structural elements such as phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar.

Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the study of language change. Historical linguistics is an important branch of linguistics.

The original historical linguistics was comparative linguistics, which is known in Chinese as historical comparative linguistics. It is based on the comparative method of history and studies the kinship of language. It is mainly concerned with the combing of linguistic genealogies and the mapping of prehistoric (i.e., pre-written) languages.

The content of historical linguistics is mainly divided into three parts, including language change, the relationship between languages, and the method of historical comparison. Studying language change is extremely important for understanding human language and human language ability. The research results of historical linguistics reveal the prehistoric development of language changes and the connections between the early and late variants of the same language, providing clues to the kinship of different languages.

The study of historical linguistics can also lead to a deeper understanding of the role of non-linguistic factors, such as sociocultural and psychological factors, in the process of language change.

General Linguistics Concepts General linguistics is also known as "general linguistics", "philosophy of language" or "theoretical linguistics". It is a theoretical generalization of the views and research results of human language, and is a sub-discipline of linguistics that studies the nature, development and origin of language, as well as the types and classification of languages.

General linguistics takes all human languages as the research object, and studies the nature, structural characteristics and development laws of human language. It focuses on the common laws of various human languages and the common characteristics of the structure of various languages, which is also called "general linguistics".

General linguistics focuses on the common problems of human language in general. It studies the following basic issues: the nature of language, the structure of language, the origin of language, the development and change of language and its laws, the special methods of language research, the various departments of linguistics and their relationship with each other, and the position of linguistics in the scientific system.

General linguistics synthesizes the facts and theories of all specific linguistic studies, generalizes them, and then goes back to guide the study of linguistics as a whole. That's why some people call it philosophy of language or theoretical linguistics. The basis of general linguistics is specific linguistics.

The more types and in-depth the study of specific languages, the richer and more comprehensive the content of general linguistics will be. With the gradual deepening of specific language research, it is inevitable to discover linguistic facts that are not summarized and explained by linguistic theories. In order to explain these problems, it is necessary to explore the theory of general linguistics and summarize new principles.

New principles, in turn, can guide new practices and discover things that have not been discovered before. In this cycle, linguistics continues to develop in this cycle.

General linguistics makes languages richer.

Historical comparative linguistics began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are three main reasons for the rise of historical comparative linguistics: the accumulation of linguistic material, the introduction of the scientific method, and the discovery of Sanskrit.

Accumulation of linguistic materials.

After the Renaissance, with the awakening of national consciousness, various national languages have attracted more and more attention. Many scholars have begun to pay attention to the similarities and differences between different languages, and have made various speculations about their original languages. After Columbus's discovery of America in 1492, science tourism and adventure and the rise of religion in Europe became a craze.

As a result, Europeans have a wide range of linguistic horizons, not only in Europe, but also in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Some scholars began to consciously investigate the world's languages and collect linguistic materials.

Introduction of the scientific method.

The introduction of scientific methods from other disciplines, especially biology, was also an important reason for the rise of historical comparative linguistics. In the field of biology, scholars discovered and collected a large number of biological specimens in the first half of the eighteenth century, and in the process of collating these materials, they naturally adopted the method of historical comparison, forming a new topic of comparative anatomy and comparative botany. Because of the great achievements made in the historical comparison of these new disciplines, they have had a great impact on other disciplines, especially those in the field of linguistics.

The discovery of Sanskrit.

The discovery of Sanskrit was the most immediate impetus for the rise of historical comparative linguistics. In the eighteenth century, many missionaries studied Sanskrit to preach, and they found that there were many similar words in Latin, and the grammatical structures of the two were very similar. The similarities between Asian and Latin have aroused the interest of European scholars.

William Jones (Franz Bopp 1791-1867) was the first to begin an in-depth study of Sanskrit, discovering that Sanskrit in India shares a common historical origin with Greek and Latin in Europe.

2. Basic theories and methods of historical comparative linguistics.

The people who really laid the foundation for the theories and methods of historical comparative linguistics and systematic comparative studies were the Danish Lasker and the German Pau Pu and Grimu. They are recognized as the founders of historical comparative linguistics in the nineteenth century.

In 1814 Lasker wrote A Study of the Origins of the Old Northern or Icelandic Language (published in 1818). The first draft of the book was submitted to Lasker for a competition organized by the Danish Academy of Sciences. This later award-winning essay laid the foundation for a theoretical approach to historical comparative linguistics.

Lasker points out that the correspondence of common words does not determine the relationship between languages, because this correspondence may only be a matter of borrowing words between languages. Grammatical correspondence is a reliable sign of kinship, as there are few or no grammatical variations in the language. Lasker theoretically demonstrated the importance of phonetic communication rules for establishing linguistic kinship, and proposed some corresponding rules for Old Norse, Greek, and Latin.

Historical comparative linguistics is a discipline that compares various languages together synchronously or diachronically at different stages of the historical development of the same language in order to find phonetic, lexical, grammatical correspondences and similarities and differences between them. On the one hand, it is possible to study the structural affinities between related languages, to find out their common mother tongues, or to understand that the characteristics of each language themselves contribute to language teaching, and on the other hand, to find out the trajectory of language development and change and the reasons for language development and change.

On the basis of a large number of investigations and studies made by Lasker, Bopp, Green, and others on the Indo-European language department, a group of scholars from the University of Leipzig in Germany raised the results of historical comparative linguistics research to the level of theory and summarized them, and formally put forward systematic theoretical principles and methods for historical comparative linguistics. This group of scholars is known as the New School of Grammar. The most important principle they put forward is "the theory that there are no exceptions to the laws of speech".

According to this principle, speech changes are completely governed by the specific speech environment. Once a speech change occurs, there should be no exception to the fact that all the sounds in that particular speech environment in the same locale have changed. The linguistic community was initially generally skeptical of this principle, as there were many exceptions to the previously discovered law that could not be explained.

However, as research progresses, it has come to be realized that the exceptions mentioned earlier are also governed by other phonological laws, but these patterns have not been discovered before. Later, the ideas of the New Grammar School were finally accepted by the vast majority of the people, and they dominated historical comparative linguistics for more than half a century, becoming the theoretical basis for guiding research in this field. Although it is now generally accepted that the New Grammar School exaggerated the role of phonetic laws and did not pay enough attention to such factors as analogies, from the practice of historical comparative linguistics, the principles put forward by the New Grammar School have prompted people to study in depth the phenomena of exceptions that could not be explained by the phonetic rules of the time, and to try to discover new phonetic rules that govern these so-called exceptions, and to modify and supplement the previous rules.

Historical comparative linguistics in the 19th century was able to achieve great success, and the theoretical principles put forward by the new grammar school were greatly credited.

Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is a discipline that studies language change. Historical linguistics is an important branch of linguistics. The original historical linguistics was comparative linguistics, which is known in Chinese as historical comparative linguistics.

It is based on the comparative method of history and studies the kinship of language.