Ming Dynasty and New Rome and Infinite Magic Machine

Chapter 1698 Supreme Virtue
In fact, Egyptian is more suitable than Korean for being adapted into something similar to Chinese because the word order in Korean and Japanese is different from that in Chinese. Whether it's "satellite, predetermined orbit, enter" or "naval, Zhenzhu Bay naval port, sudden attack," the word order is subject-object-verb, rather than the subject-verb-object order more common in Chinese.

Egyptian can be seamlessly switched to its familiar form here, requiring only minor changes such as moving "了" from the end of the sentence to the beginning.

"Actually, the difference is not as big as the difference between Mandarin and Gaochun dialect."

What is the Gaochun dialect?

"It's a county near Yingtian—yes, right next to my house. Although it's right next door, Gaochun dialect is very different from Jinling dialect and other Mandarin dialects. This is because Gaochun dialect has a lot of tenses—such as past tenses, past past tenses, past perfect tenses, and perfect imperfect tenses, etc., and these differences are not expressed by words, but by adding suffixes to verbs. Take eating, for example, it sounds like 'eat,' 'eat,' 'eat,' 'eat,' etc."

"What is this?" Victoria asked, completely bewildered. "I don't understand a word of this."

"You don't understand, do you? I don't understand either. In fact, sometimes they themselves don't understand—you might wonder why this is, it's simple, because it's spoken language. And every family has different speaking habits, so a family might never use the [completed predicate], so when someone else says it, they won't understand. And how can we unleash the potential of a language? The answer is works of art."

Shakespeare's works shaped modern English because they unlocked the potential of the language and elevated its literary qualities to new heights.

For the Chinese language, "without studying poetry, one cannot speak fluently," highlighting the profound influence of literary works on literature.

“Hmm,” Victoria thought for a moment, “it seems that Latin also started by absorbing the corpus of Greek, and then there were great writers like Virgil. Without them, I really don’t know how to speak now.”

"So what is the current situation of the Coptic language?"

“There was a lack of truly literary works,” Victoria replied, “because the upper classes in Egypt mainly spoke Greek. Since Coptic itself has many Greek words, it wasn’t difficult for them to learn.”

"Oh I see."

This situation is similar to the status of the Korean language in North Korea—quite peculiar.

Korean is, of course, the mother tongue of all Koreans, but all Korean intellectuals take pride in speaking Chinese.

Although a Korean king oversaw the invention of Hangul to represent the pronunciation of the Korean language, Koreans never use Hangul in official documents. The common explanation is:

"Throughout history, though the customs and lands of the Nine Provinces have varied, there has never been a case of having a separate script based on dialects. Only the Mongols, Western Xia, Jurchens, and Japanese each have their own scripts. These are all matters of barbarians and are not worth mentioning. Now, a separate script, Korean script, is created, abandoning China and becoming like barbarians. This is like discarding the fragrance of styrax and taking the pill of a mantis; is this not a burden on civilization?"

This means that inventing a writing system other than Chinese characters is something only barbarian tribes like the Mongols and Jurchens could do. For Koreans to use Hangul is tantamount to self-degradation, to joining forces with barbarians, and utterly rebellious.

All historical materials and government documents of North Korea are written in Chinese—not just Chinese characters, but directly in Classical Chinese, with standards comparable to those of the imperial court's official history books. Although North Koreans do speak Korean, they are perfectly tolerant of the complete separation between spoken and written language.

The Korean scholars here displayed remarkable resilience, inventing a form of "Idu-mon" as a medium for this "hybrid state." It was neither Korean nor Chinese, but a mixed language that no one actually spoke.

For example, in Chinese, the method of raising silkworms is described as follows: Silkworms are yang creatures, therefore they dislike moisture, eat broken mulberry leaves, and do not drink water.
In the official's reading, it would be written as: Silkworms [Duan] Yang things [is it like using good], water vapor [Yi] dislikes, mulberry leaves [Gan] eat broken [to send], drinking water [not winter].

At first glance it seems inexplicable, but the official reading text here completely replaces the names and verbs with Chinese characters, and then writes the Korean function words as 【段】, 【乙】, and 【不冬】.

This is an informal written language—after all, not all Koreans are literary giants. Some lower-ranking scribes still had to write something at least readable.

“Wait a minute,” Victoria noticed the word, “what’s this hybrid style called?”

"Have the official read the document aloud," Shangluo replied.

“Egypt. Remember what I just said? History is really interesting here. That's how the Egyptian scribal script came about.”

After all, even clergy in Egypt couldn't fully decipher hieroglyphs, but daily paperwork required it—so scribe script came into being. This is almost identical to the process by which Korean script, the Idu script, was developed, and the resulting script is remarkably similar.

The Hangul written under the Idu script became something similar to the Coptic alphabet. It had no semantic function and could only represent sounds like an alphabet. At this point, even if one learned this way of writing, in the eyes of the upper class, it was no different from illiteracy. In the eyes of Koreans, this was "all barbarian stuff, not worth mentioning."

[The Coptic people looking at the North Koreans are like another version of myself in the world.]

"Actually, there are still big differences. I see a sad possibility in the Coptic people—if our civilization degenerates, it is very likely that it will degenerate into something like the Koreans."

Because the Coptic people are essentially Egyptians who lost their dominant culture. After their superstructure was completely destroyed and they were ruled by the Greeks for 275 years, Egyptian culture could only find its way out in the cracks of history.

"Thankfully, none of that happened." Zhu Xianxi breathed a sigh of relief. "That's why Emperor Taizu Gao has such glorious achievements that shine through the ages. If the Yuan Dynasty had continued, we probably would have ended up like that too—of course, now it's our turn to save Egyptian culture. We must return the core of our culture from the hands of the Romans and Greeks back to the Egyptians themselves."

So, won't this really cause the Egyptians to disappear completely? Then they'll lose their culture too.

Zhu Xianxi shook his head: "Regardless of the form, I have handed the initiative back to them. This is about punishing the wicked and reviving the extinct. We have preserved Egypt's temples and sacrifices, and now it's up to them. This is the highest virtue, the highest virtue indeed. Incidentally, we also gave them the ability to read Chinese texts as a bonus. We also gave them a copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which Koreans love to read."

(End of this chapter)