In ancient times, there was a man who wanted to go to court and could not read himself. He asked an old scholar to write a complaint for him. The old scholar asked his name, and he said, "My name is Wang Pu Pia". This stumbles scholars. If Pia can't write it, there will be no accuser. The old scholar said, "You don't have to remember your name, but you must name it Pia. Not a word is pronounced Pia. " The complainant said: "When I go to my husband's house for the New Year, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law call me brother-in-law. Just write "brother-in-law"! " The old scholar listened and did it with great pleasure.
The complaint was sent to the county government. When the county magistrate saw that it was Wang's brother-in-law, he said to the government, "Take Wang's brother-in-law to court!"
Hearing this, the officials shouted in unison, "Call Uncle Wang to class!"
The magistrate patted the gavel and scolded, "Bastard, I want you to pass on Wang's brother-in-law, but who told you to pass on Uncle Wang?"
Yamou people defended: "Report to your master, your name is brother-in-law, but you don't call your uncle. What's your name?"
County magistrate a listen to in distress situation. It's just strange that there was no phonetic word Pia in Chinese characters, and there were no phonetic letters at that time, so the old scholar couldn't write this word or the complainant's real name, which caused misunderstanding.
Characters are symbols of recording languages. It stands to reason that everything people say can be recorded in corresponding words, but the characteristics of Chinese characters are ideographic and have no direct relationship with pronunciation. Often this word is pronounced in spoken language, especially in dialect vocabulary, but it can't be written in written language. This word has no form in the text, which is why the old scholar can't write the name "Wang Pu Pia".
Chinese characters are typical ideographic characters in the world today. The basic characters in the world can be divided into two categories, phonography and ideographic characters. Phonetic symbol is a kind of character that uses a series of symbols to express language sound. This kind of writing uses a set of letters to spell out words in the language, also called Pinyin. Phonology understands sound through form and meaning through sound. For example, the word "horse" is written in English, and people who read it will know it is ho:s] at a glance, and they will think it is "horse" only from this sound. English, Russian, German and Arabic, as well as Mongolian, Tibetan and Uygur in China are all phonography. The advantage of phonetic notation is that all words are spelled with only dozens of letters, which is easy to learn and write. Ideographic characters are words that use stroke symbols to express lexical meaning, but do not directly or simply express pronunciation. Chinese characters are basically ideographic characters, and each Chinese character is a syllable (with a few exceptions, for example, "Hua 'er" is two Chinese characters, which reads like a syllable huar). Generally, you can't clearly express the pronunciation, but you can accurately express the meaning, such as "horse's head", "wharf", "stamp" and "oil ticket", which makes readers feel embarrassed, but it means a lot.