Chapter 42: Unison
The village, more than a hundred miles away, was still peaceful. Chen Jian had no idea what had happened to Hua and his people.
He was still immersed in his dream of enticing the other tribes into farming after the upcoming autumn harvest. Once next year's summer harvest proved successful, he could persuade those tribes to join them. He would teach them to reclaim land, arrange marriages, and within three to five years, they would become kin.
With a territory spanning a diameter of two hundred *li*, encompassing nearly ten thousand square kilometers, plus the land on the south bank of the Caohe River, the seeds harvested next year should be enough to support a small city of a thousand people.
In his previous life, the Chinese civilization first scattered like stars, forming hundreds of thousands of small city-states, or *Fangguo*, before finally merging into one. It began with ancestors migrating and expanding, only to eventually unify. Otherwise, there would be no legends of Yao and Shun, nor stories of eight hundred vassal lords defeating King Zhou.
With the communication technology of this era, the effective range a *Fangguo* could control was within a hundred-mile radius.
According to his plan, as long as he could ally with the nearby tribes, they could spend a few years quietly developing their agriculture and capturing slaves to rapidly advance their bronze technology. This would allow them to form a *Fangguo*, an ethnic group unlikely to be erased by the long river of history, all within 30 years.
However, this seemingly perfect plan was just a plan. It didn't account for external threats. Even a single severe drought could be enough to revert the tribe to its original state, forcing them to disperse to survive.
Such scenarios were not uncommon in the archaeological records of Chinese civilization from his past life. The Hongshan cultural site, which had once birthed a brilliant civilization, was a prime example. They had evidence of sacrifices but not soldiers, a developed jade culture, settled agriculture, goddess worship, copper-smelting crucibles, and interconnected pottery kilns; even jade dragons had appeared among their burial objects, but no weapons of war. It was, in essence, a peaceful, idyllic state.
Yet, this powerful culture was located on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. A sudden southward shift of the 400 mm isohyet triggered a period of semi-aridity, dealing a devastating blow to their settlement-based culture and ultimately leading to their decline. The cause of the drought might have been as simple as a sudden increase in solar activity or a slight wobble in the Earth's rotation.
This was the cruelty of reality; civilization was rife with too many chances. Take the meteorite tribe, for instance. If that meteorite had fallen next to his own tribe, Chen Jian was confident their development would have been even faster.
The only thing to be thankful for was that beyond chance, there were also patterns and inevitabilities. Man proposes, God disposes. For now, he could only hope for favorable weather for the next couple of years. As long as his tribe could master farming within two years, they would not fear the coming of a drought. At worst, they could migrate south.
They had already reclaimed dozens of acres of land in the past few days, and their speed was increasing. The reclaimed land was arranged in alternating concave and convex rows. When it was time to plant, they would break the tops of the ridges, turning them into furrows and the former furrows into new ridges. Year after year, this rotation would become habit. With the shared labor force provided by land-allied tribes and slaves, they could fully realize this kind of intensive farming.
Once the land was allocated, they should be able to find cattle. With manure and grass composted and spread each year, the soil would gradually mature. This ridge-breaking farming method would still be in use thousands of years later; its technical difficulty was not too high. The yield might be lower in the early stages due to the quality of the seeds, but with the help of fishing and hunting, they could sustain themselves until they successfully cultivated improved seed varieties.
The brick kiln was not yet built, but Chen Jian was not going to oversee it. He wanted the people to figure it out for themselves and build it when the time was right.
In the future, the children would learn life skills from these artisans through an apprenticeship system. He himself had a broad but shallow knowledge of many things; when it came to solving common production problems, he was certainly no match for those on the front lines.
Looking further ahead, some women in the tribe were already pregnant. He would provide the initial enlightenment for those children, and when they were a little older, they would go to the front lines as apprentices, learning by doing.
Even if those artisans could only summarize the various precautions for burning charcoal and firing bricks from experience before this next generation grew up, it would be worthwhile. Some matters were not of life-or-death urgency and could be considered with a longer perspective.
Because he had been so lost in thought, he hadn't joined the clansmen for their evening festivities these past few nights. Instead, he found a quiet place to ponder the issue of language.
Spoken language predates writing, and writing takes time to accumulate. Since he had decided to use pictographic and ideographic characters, he needed to establish their pronunciation in advance to prepare for future generations.
He ruled out an alphabet. When they eventually expanded, different pronunciations would inevitably arise, and unifying them would be a problem.
In his previous life, the pronunciation of ancient Chinese characters was indicated using the direct sound method and the *fanqie* method. The direct sound method was simple: the character for "carp" (鯉) is pronounced "li" (里). The *fanqie* method was more like a phonetic alphabet. It combined two characters, taking the initial consonant from the first and the final vowel cluster from the second. For example, to indicate the pronunciation of the character "囡" (nān), the annotation might be "奴安" (nú ān), taking the "n-" from *nú* and the "-ān" from *ān*.
After some thought, he decided he must use the *fanqie* method, but with improvements.
He wanted to create 47 characters representing 23 initial consonants and 24 final sounds. These 47 characters had to be simple and refer to common things in their future lives, which would require assigning new pronunciations to some objects.
These 47 characters would then serve as the phonetic table for the *fanqie* system. If promoted, it could form at least a roughly uniform pronunciation. As long as someone learned the sounds of these 47 characters, they could spell out the rest on their own.
Fortunately, most of the objects from later generations had not yet appeared, making it relatively easy to come up with 47 common, everyday characters.
For example, the "candle" (烛, zhú) did not yet exist, so its pronunciation was unassigned. He could repurpose it. When writing the character for "candle," one would only take the initial consonant, pronouncing it "zh-". Meanwhile, for the word "hemp" (麻, má), which was about to appear, they would remove the initial consonant, leaving only the final, writing "Ma" but pronouncing it "-a".
This way, when future generations encountered a new word and saw the phonetic notation "Zhuma" (烛麻) next to it, they would know to combine the sounds to read it as "zha".
The reason he didn't just choose characters that already had those sounds was that candles and hemp were common things that even a farmer would recognize, making them easy to remember. The writing of these characters would also need to be slightly modified so that most people could recognize them within a month.
This was a long-term project with no short-term benefits, but it was worth investing the time to prepare for future unification and standardized pronunciation.
Even if he couldn't find 47 commonly used things, there were other options. Yu Qian'er was observing the moon. One day, the people would discover there were twelve months in a year. The celestial stems and earthly branches—a system combining decimal and binary concepts—would also appear, and he could repurpose their pronunciations then. It would be best to write the characters for "Zi Wu Mao You," but have them read as "b, p, m, f" or "a, o, e"—sounds so simple that anyone could master them.
He carefully thought about what the tribe had already named and wrote it down. Then he listed the things that would appear soon, preparing to assign their names now. At a minimum, some of the 47 characters in his plan could no longer be pronounced the old way. He would have to leave the rest to chance; otherwise, the project would be too massive for him to complete even if he worked himself to exhaustion.
In fact, he had already begun this process. For instance, when the clansmen were discussing surnames, he had picked a plant and declared it was called *Ji*, a name that would one day eclipse Tao and Wang. In reality, he had picked a type of wild wheat. He chose that pronunciation only because "*Ji*" was a single consonant sound. The character *Ji* from his past life referred to millet and had nothing to do with wheat.
It felt a bit strange to him, but for the tribe, which was learning everything from scratch, it was perfectly suitable. He was, after all, naming things that had never had a formal name before.
After several days of work, he finally compiled a list of 47 things that either existed or soon would. Now, he had to change his own habits. When new things appeared, he must not subconsciously name them according to his past life but instead assign them the initial and final sounds he wanted.
This was a process more difficult than learning a foreign language. It felt like pointing at a mouse but forcing himself to call it a cat. Fortunately, there were only 47. Any more, and he would truly go mad.
Everything he was doing now was to lay a foundation. It was better to introduce subtle changes from the beginning than to reform established customs later.
Before the industrial age, the literacy rate was bound to be extremely low. While his method couldn't directly improve the literacy rate, it could implicitly increase the speed at which children learned to read and pronounce words, making it easier to promote a standard language.
He stared at the list of objects on the birch bark, memorizing them over and over in his mind. He must not blurt out the wrong name when the time came, or it would be troublesome to correct.
As he was muttering to himself, he heard the sound of footsteps and hurriedly hid the bark.
In the distance, Yu Qian'er's voice rang out: "Brother, something happened!"
Chen Jian was startled. He had never encountered such an urgent situation. Almost instantly, the entire village erupted in noise.
The yelps of wolf cubs, the shouts of the clansmen, and the pounding of footsteps merged into one. Yu Qian'er grabbed Chen Jian's hand and pulled him toward the main fire.
"Hua is back," she said as they ran.
"What?"
Chen Jian was stunned and rushed over. Hua was slumped by the fire, trembling violently, his body soaked. When he saw Chen Jian, he pointed toward the Caohe River and gasped, "Someone... is in the river!"
The clansmen had never faced such a crisis and were in a state of panicked confusion. Chen Jian shouted, "Someone take care of him! Get him hot soup and rub him vigorously until he's warm! The rest of the men, follow me to the riverbank! Hurry!"
He had a rough idea of what had happened. It took several days to travel from Hua's settlement, but Hua had returned so quickly. There was only one possibility. He must have run until he collapsed, then chopped down a log and floated down the river. Something terrible had clearly happened.
The tribesmen carried the birch bark boats to the river's edge. It was pitch black. Fortunately, the bonfire in the village acted as a lighthouse; otherwise, Hua would never have been able to find this place.
"Light torches! Light torches! Quick!"
The clansmen hurried back to get firebrands, and soon several large fires blazed along the riverbank.
Chen Jian snatched a bow from Wolf Skin, tied a pine branch to a fletched arrow, lit it, and shot it into the heart of the river. The other clansmen followed his lead.
Peering into the darkness upstream, they could see several logs floating down. On top of them lay several figures, their conditions unknown.
"What in the world happened?" Chen Jian whispered, horrified as he looked at the floating forms of Hua's people.
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