Pinyin had its embryonic form in the Qing Dynasty, and it was only in the period of the Republic of China that the scheme of Pinyin really came out. So how did the ancients learn the pronunciation of Chinese characters when they read and read without Pinyin? I want to know how the ancients could read without Pinyin. Let's learn with Xiaobian.
Since ancient times, people have attached great importance to education. Children in ancient times should be familiar with poetry, songs and Fu, four books and five classics, girls should learn knitting and spinning, and girls from rich families should learn piano, chess, calligraphy and painting. Knitting and spinning are equivalent to today's handicrafts. Piano, chess, calligraphy and painting are all very popular skills in modern times. If we put ancient children into modern times, they would have been prodigy level.
The basis for the ancients to learn all these things is inseparable from one thing -- Chinese characters. Chinese characters are extensive and profound, including polysyllabic and polysemous characters, rare characters, homonyms, antonyms and so on.
The basis of learning Chinese characters is Pinyin. Only by learning 'a, B, C, d', can you speak Chinese fluently. Many people may be curious, there is no Pinyin in ancient times, how did the ancients read and read!
According to historical records, Pinyin first appeared in China in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, that is, after the Opium War, Liang Qichao and a group of literary talents jointly launched the 'Qiyin movement'. Lu bianzhang was the first person to create Pinyin. He was also the first person to use Qieyin characters to spell Mandarin. The real Pinyin of Chinese characters was not officially announced until 1918, that is to say, it took only a few hundred years for pinyin to appear in China.
Even if there was no Pinyin, it would be difficult for intelligent ancients. The ancients had taken this problem into consideration when they created Chinese characters, and thus invented four methods: pictophonetic characters, direct tone method, reading Ruo method and reverse tangent method.
Pictophonetic characters are composed of two characters or words, which are composed of semantic symbols (pictograms) representing meaning categories and phonetic symbols (phonetic symbols) representing sound categories. Most of the characters with the same radicals have similar pronunciation, and when we encounter this kind of unknown words, we will choose to mark them with the words we know.
The method of phonetic notation for ancient Chinese is called Zhiyin method. When I was a child, I would use pinyin to replace any character that I couldn't read. In fact, it was also a way for the ancients to read.
Fanqie method is also a common method, which was created by the ancients after "Zhiyin" and "duruo". Its basic rule is to use two Chinese characters to spell the phonetic notation of a word, cut up the character to get the initial consonant, cut the character to get the vowel and tone.