The changes in speech development also follow regular patterns. The pronunciation of some sounds today does not affect the understanding of classical poetry at all. For example, reading "Silent Night Thoughts" can be completely understood by everyone reading it in Mandarin, and it basically has no impact on the beauty of the rhythm of ancient poetry. But the reading of other poems is affected by the changes in pronunciation in ancient and modern times. "Rhymed poems, quatrains, and lyrics pay attention to rhyme and oblique patterns. These two points are directly related to the evolution of pronunciation. In the Tang and Song Dynasties, flat refers to the flat tone, and oblique refers to the three tones of up, down, and enter. Today, there is no entering tone, so when encountering the oblique pattern There are changes from time to time, which may have a greater impact on rhyming. ” Su Peicheng said.
For example, Du Fu's "Moon Night": "Tonight in Yanzhou, I can only watch the moon alone in my boudoir." I pity my children from afar, but I still remember Chang'an. "The rhyme "look" has four tones according to today's pronunciation. The meaning is understandable, but it doesn't rhyme well with "安". Another example is the "Xie" in Du Mu's "山行" "The stone path on the distant Hanshan Mountain", Zha's "Guangyun" and "家" and "花" are all in May rhyme, which originally rhymes with each other. If it is pronounced as "xié", everyone will be confused. It's hard to accept, but the pronunciation of "xiá" is not an ancient pronunciation. It is actually the phonetic notation of "Ye Yin".
Sun Yuwen, a professor at Peking University, also believes that ancient pronunciation is a pronunciation system from ancient times. Although today’s scholars can construct ancient pronunciation based on the laws of pronunciation development, most people will not listen to poetry if they read it accordingly. If you don’t understand, you will lose the basic communication function of language. Ancient poems and articles in the past dynasties were actually read according to the pronunciation commonly used at that time. In response to the view that advocates reading ancient poems in dialects, phonology expert Tang Zuofan has long pointed out that reading He Zhizhang's "Returning to Hometown Oops" in Shanxi Pingyao dialect is harmonious, but reading other poems may not rhyme. In fact, there is no dialect today that can pronounce all the rhymes of ancient poems in rhyme. Based on the above reasons, Sun Yuwen believes that the use of Mandarin pronunciation should be advocated when reciting ancient poems.
In the opinion of Wu Xiangzhou, a professor at Guangzhou University, whether to use ancient pronunciation or Mandarin when reading ancient poetry requires a balanced grasp and two principles should be followed: First, for the rhyme part, if rhyme is needed, the pronunciation of the ancient pronunciation can be taken into account. If the pronunciation is broken, It doesn’t become poetry. Secondly, words with different pronunciations representing different meanings should be read with ancient pronunciation. For example, the word "ride" (jì) in "一千" means one person and one horse. If it is read as "qí", the meaning is wrong.
Shen Wenfan believes that people today can rhyme in Mandarin when writing poems, but when reciting ancient poems, the rhymes must be changed. “The key is to conform to the rules of poetry. China has preserved many rhyme books with written records, and this precious cultural wealth must be inherited.
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