Bab 27: Chapter 26 Creating Characters
The warm monsoon, carrying moist vapor, rose from the tranquil Caribbean Sea.
It passed through the still wild islands, through the fierce rainforest, across the Vastec plains, and then rose along the Mexican Plateau, caressing the flourishing Mexican Valley before turning into a gentle drizzle.
The drizzle drifted across the sky and fields, over mountains and forests, past the sturdy mountain city of the Otomi, and reached the camps of the Mexica samurai nestled in the mountains.
Then, it gently fell, dampening the cloth of a log cabin, drops tracing soft arcs that caught the eye of a young boy.
The boy lifted his pen in contemplation, then drew a pictograph of water: five curving blue lines, and below them he wrote the character for "water".
The youth, Xiulote, looked at the wooden board in front of him, which was filled with blue drawings and characters. The content was split into two lines, the first line consisting of various pictographs similar to oracle bone script, the second being traditional Chinese characters.
Seeing that the board was full, he took it from the clay stand in front of him and placed it into a neatly arranged pile of boards beside him.
Next, he picked up a brush made from hair, dipped it in indigo Maya blue ink, and before he could start deeply contemplating, noticed that there was not much ink left.
He then called for Bertade to go to the rooms of the priests and fetch some more Maya blue dye. If that was not enough, he was to mix some on-site with leaves from the wild blue tree and clay from the slopes.
After Bertade left, Xiulote sighed deeply, feeling all his wisdom had been drained, and knew he needed a break to regain some energy.
The siege had already lasted two weeks, and he had finally found some free time. Xiulote began an endeavor he had long contemplated and which was of great importance: "creating a script".
In Xiulote's eyes, the Aztec, and indeed the whole of Central America, were still in an era of graphical record-keeping, the sprouting of hieroglyphs just beginning, like the "war" figures he had once learned with his father—a shield and a club, and "death", a white cloth wrapping a corpse.
These figures were still in the budding phase of hieroglyphs, much more primitive than the full "six scripts" of the Yin Dynasty's oracle bone script, and were estimated to be on the same level as the Seal Script from the legends of the Xia Dynasty. This also suggested that the forebears of America, when they separated from Eurasia, were still in a pre-historic era without any script.
According to Xiulote's experience, the Aztec's current pictographs were too arbitrary, with their writing and interpretation changing according to the user's whims, with cultural power firmly locked in the hands of the priests.
Script is the foundation of a nation, and culture is its backbone.
For the ambitious Xiulote, he could not tolerate the Empire's current lack of a writing system and resolved to personally rectify this flaw.
At first, Xiulote was ambitious, planning to emulate mythological legends to create a complete script system of his own. However, this idea only lasted for ten minutes before stopping dead at the first character.
Then, Xiulote turned to the script system he was most familiar with and loved the most: Chinese.
After a long contemplation, he thought that a Mexica Empire using Chinese characters wouldn't be too bad either, "Huaxia Aztec Celestial Empire unifying America" just thinking about it made his blood surge.
Next, he encountered a dilemma, "The development of writing does not happen overnight."
For the nascent Mexica, it was impossible for them to start using simplified characters right away. A Mexica samurai could understand "the universe was vast," yet had not learned about "Vast Universe," could see "the sun and the moon waxing," but did not understand "the arrangement of constellations." For him, abstract terms like "science," "economy," "culture," had no foundational concepts established yet.
Chinese characters themselves represented a recognition of the world and society, originating from pictographs and from the simplest perception of the world, then through various eras, with the integration of thoughts and cultural transformations, they moved from the pictorial to the abstract. Each explanation in explaining characters and words was an understanding of the world by the ancestors.
Xiulote did not just want to introduce Chinese characters as tools, similar to how modern Mexico used Spanish. He wished to integrate the mature Han culture that relied on script. This way, on one hand, it would accelerate the development of the entire Aztec civilization, and on the other hand, it would mitigate the excessively bloody human sacrifice culture. Simultaneously, using the complete framework of Chinese characters as the main body, integrating existing pictograms, then introducing the phono-semantic characters of the Nava language, thus saving thousands of years of evolutionary time. Then, he would rely on script to swiftly undergo reforms in the Alliance's politics, religion, and culture.
"When King Wen taught and transformed, ladies-in-waiting behaved as dignified as dukes and ministers. Passing by, they dared not slacken, they stood and straightened their caps and tassels." Xiulote recited a few lines of poetry, then feeling that comparing himself to King Wen and the samurai to ladies-in-waiting was a bit too pretentious, he chuckled and continued to meditate deeply.
Now, Xiulote already had a specific template for the script: traditional Chinese characters.
What he had to do was to use semi-pictographic traditional Chinese characters as a basis, to deduce even more pictographic Oracle Bone Script, Seal Script, or invented pictographs, and establish a logical process from concrete objects->pictographic Oracle Bone/Seal Script->semi-pictographic traditional Chinese characters. Finally, from the semi-pictographic traditional Chinese characters, he derived the abstract concept meanings.
After a short while, Xiulote heard someone lift the cloth covering the door and saw Bertade entering with a pottery jar of dyes, followed by Aweit, whom he hadn't seen in several days.
"Xiulote, what have you been busy with lately?" smiled Aweit. "There have been quite a few banquets at the camp these past few days, but I haven't seen you there."
"Banquets are just eating some roasted deer and drinking some tequila. Our supplies have been tight lately, and there hasn't been much good food," Xiulote also smiled. "I've been busy with a big project lately, Aweit. If you have time, you could help me."
The two then sat cross-legged at the edge of an earthen platform, with deer skin blankets laid out on the ground.
"Take a look at these wooden boards," Xiulote pointed at a stack by his foot.
"What is this?" Aweit looked at the two rows of figures and text on the wooden boards.
"This is writing. The top row consists of various images, many of which we have studied on the Ritual Plates. The line of text below summarizes the meanings of the images and has a fixed writing style and text construction structure. You can try to guess the meaning of the text based on the images," explained Xiulote.
Aweit grew interested and began to study carefully.
"This wooden board, does the top row of images show a person, an eye, a mountain, a river, a tree, two trees, three trees, a fish?"
Xiulote glanced at it, the line of text underneath read, "man, eye, mountain, water, tree, woods, forest, fish."
"Right, the text below is a standardized writing form and a condensation of the meanings of the pictures above. See, a single 'tree' character represents one tree, whereas two 'tree' characters represent a large grove, and three 'tree' characters represent the forest beyond us. The stacking of the 'tree' character doesn't refer to the quantity of one, two, three, but rather an expansion of the meaning in a larger spatial sense," explained Xiulote.
"Then this wooden board, are the images a person holding something round, a river with land in the middle, a tree bearing fruit, an eye with hair above it, a person looking up at the sky? Are these images derived from the previous wooden board?"
"Exactly, so the text below is related to the previous images as well. In order, they are melon, isthmus, fruit, eyebrow, sky. 'Melon' comes from the character for person, 'isthmus' from the character for water, 'fruit' from the character for tree, 'eyebrow' from the character for eye, and 'sky' also comes from the character for person," Xiulote detailed.
"Aweit, take a look at this one. The one that grows on the ground with round fruits is called 'bean'; when the beans are flourishing with lots of sprouts and leaves, it's called 'abundant', meaning a bountiful harvest; this shape of a skeleton represents 'bone' in our bodies. 'Abundant' derives from the idea of being large and full from harvest, 'bone' combined with 'abundant' expands to represent your body, which is 'body'..."
"And look at this one, a single line is 'one', two lines are 'two', three lines are 'three', a short line with a long line is 'above', a long line with a short line is 'below'..."
The two conversed more and more in tune with each other until the evening fell and the room grew dim.
"Xiulote, these characters are fascinating. At first, they all represent things that can be seen and touched. Then, by combining them, they transform into things that can't be seen or touched. Yet, despite not knowing these things, looking at the characters you've talked about, I somehow feel like I can understand them," Aweit remarked.
"That's because you're very clever," laughed Xiulote. "What do you think of these characters?"
"They're really good," Aweit praised happily.
"How about I tell you the meanings of the characters, then you draw the corresponding images?" Xiulote suggested enticingly.
"Sure. I've been relatively free these days. I'll play along with you for a while," Aweit agreed.
"Imagine, just imagine. If this isn't just play, I would like to use these characters with fixed meanings to replace the priests' pictographic records, what do you think?"
A moment of silence.
Then, Aweit smiled and said, "I'd like to live a bit longer, and I'd like you to live longer too."
Hadiah
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