1. Why are there many four-character idioms?
Why are there more four-character idioms? This is probably because the four characters are easy to pronounce. For example, the ancient Chinese poetry collection "The Book of Songs" mostly contains four-character sentences, and the ancient history "Shangshu" also contains some four-character sentences. Later, when I first learned to read San, Bai and Qian, "Three Character Classic", "Hundred Family Surnames" and "Thousand Character Classic", the latter two were all four-character sentences. The first, second and third episodes of "Four-character Miscellaneous Characters" and "Longwen Whip Shadow" are all four-character. Although this is a book of instruction, it is enough to show that the four-character sentence is loved and recited by people.
As mentioned before, idioms mostly consist of four characters, and there are relatively few idioms with less than four characters or more than four characters; especially idioms with less than four characters are even rarer in comparison. Therefore, when Japanese speak Chinese, they have the term "four-character Chinese" (see the 1978 edition of "Modern Chinese Language for Junior High Schools" edited by Yoshida Noboru et al.), and some also call it "four-character idioms" (see the 1978 edition 8th edition, "Secondary School Chinese" edited by Imaizumi Tadayoshi and others). However, in our opinion, some of the examples they included in "Four-Character Chinese" and "Four-Character Idioms" are not what we call idioms, because we don't have that kind of saying. Such as "left to right", "intention to convey", "execution hesitation", "question and answer" and so on. Another example is that they consider "spring, summer, autumn and winter", "front and back, left and right", and "east, west, south" to be "four-character idioms", and we cannot agree with them. "Spring, summer, autumn and winter" are meteorological terms, "front, back, left, and right" are commonly used directional terms in daily life, and "east, west, south, north" are commonly used directional terms in geography.
Despite this, the obvious four-character nature of the idiom is undeniable. For example, the following idioms, judging from their origins, are not four-character idioms. In other words, these idioms are all refined words that are not four-character words to form four-character idioms. Let’s take a look at the relationship between the following idioms and their origins: < /p>
(1) Observe the fine points clearly, "Knowing enough to see the end of the fine hair, without seeing the clues." ("Mencius King Hui of Liang", Part 1)
(2) Seeking fish by looking at trees, "seeing fish according to what is said." To ask for what you want is like asking for a fish while relying on a tree." ("Mencius King Hui of Liang" Part 1)
(3) Get twice the result with half the effort. A country of ten thousand chariots will be benevolent, and the people will be happy with it. The story is that people from ancient times will have twice as much merit, but this is the case at this time. "("Mencius Gongsun Chou" Part 1)
< p> (4) Carving a boat to ask for a sword. "There was a Chu man who was wading in the river. His sword fell from the boat into the water. He quickly signed (carved) the boat and said: This is where my sword fell. The boat stopped, and he entered the water to ask for it. The boat has already moved, but the sword cannot move. Isn't it confusing to ask for a sword like this? It is "Three Commandments", and there is a subtitle in it called "The Donkey of Guizhou". "The donkey in Guizhou has no skills" is extracted from the story narrated in this article.(6) My broom is worth a thousand gold (or "my broom is precious"). "There is a saying in the Chinese saying: If you have a bad broom at home and enjoy it, you will not see the trouble." (Cao Pi's "Dianlun·Essays") 》)
From the above, the four-character nature of idioms is very obvious. Or reduce the words that are more than four words to four words, such as "Knowing the truth clearly" and "Finding fish by chance", or combine two sentences into one sentence with only four words, such as "Get twice the result with half the effort" and "My daughter's gold". Or a story with many words can be compiled into four characters and become an idiom, such as "carving (deed) the boat to seek the sword" and "the Guizhou donkey is exhausted".
There are some words from the ancients that were originally worthy of aphorisms and can become idioms. Just because changing it to four characters was more troublesome, I had to abandon it and use it as a guide. For example, "The Story of Yueyang Tower" written by Fan Zhongyan of the Song Dynasty contains the phrase "Be anxious when the world is worried first, and be happy when the world is happy later." The meaning is very good, but due to the large number of words, it cannot be formed into an idiom. We can only It is regarded as an aphorism and is sometimes introduced into an article. For example, "hardship comes first, enjoyment comes later", which is easy to say and remember, and it can be used as an idiom in "Yueyang Tower" because "all wastes will prosper". It is an idiom with four characters.
Why are there so many idioms with four characters? This is probably because four characters are easy to pronounce. For example, the ancient Chinese poetry collection "The Book of Songs" uses four characters as its idiom. There are also some four-character sentences in the ancient history "Shangshu". Later, the San, Bai, and Qian "San Zi Jing", "Hundred Family Surnames" and "Qian Zi Wen" were all four-character sentences. The first, second and third episodes of "Za Zi" and "Long Wen Bian Ying" are all four-character. Although this is a training book, it is enough to show that four-character sentences are loved and recited. 2. Why are most idioms composed of four characters. Words
Idioms are ready-made idioms, which are short sentences composed of fixed words that the people have used in their long-term life. There are a large number of idioms in the Chinese vocabulary. They all have certain origins and grow long after they are formed and appear. Time is used by the people.
1. Characteristics of idioms. The first feature is that it has a long history.
It refers to the history of idioms. Nature, for example: the idiom "have nothing to fear" first appeared in "Zuo Zhuan·The Twenty-Sixth Year of Duke Xi" "The room is like a hanging house with no grass in the field, how can you have nothing to fear" and has been used for more than 2,000 years. "It comes from a story written by Duan Chengshi of the Tang Dynasty, "Although you are cutting grass, I have frightened the snake." It has been used for at least a thousand years.
"Chasing wind and catching shadows" first appeared in Zhu Xi's "Xue Yi of the Complete Book of Zhuzi" by Zhu Xi of the Song Dynasty, "two-faced and three-faced swords" first appeared in "Yuan Qu Hui Lan Ji", "Southern tune and northern tune" first appeared in "Yanjing Shishi Ji" written by Fucha Dunchong of the Qing Dynasty. These idioms have a history of one to two hundred or even eight or nine hundred years.
⑵Long flow. Refers to the social nature of idiom usage. Idioms are accepted by the people and widely used in writing or orally. Like some idioms from ancient poems, they are original texts taken from poems from different eras. Because they have profound meanings or vivid images, they are aphorisms and famous sentences in the whole poem. They are loved by the people and widely used and recited. be spread. For example, "The spring breeze is triumphant", "The beauty is equally divided", "The rain is about to come and the wind fills the building", "The wine and meat smells stinky in Zhumen, and there are frozen bones on the road", "The wild fire will not burn out, but the spring breeze will revive it" and so on.
The second characteristic is that the stereotype remains unchanged. Idioms are stereotyped phrases, most of which consist of four characters. Of course, there are also three words, five words, or even more words. Such as "smoking away", "getting to the next level", "thousands of sails passing by the side of the sunken boat, thousands of spring trees in front of the diseased tree", "don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you", etc., but these are only a few after all. Why do idioms mostly have four characters? This is related to the characteristics of the Chinese language. Most of the syllables spoken by the Han nationality are in pairs. Chinese pays attention to four tones, which can produce a sense of beauty in sound when read. The structure of the four characters can adapt to various changes in these tones. The Book of Songs, the earliest collection of poems in the history of Chinese literature, has 305 poems that are basically all four-character sentences. This kind of four-character sentences has a short and concise structure, lively and bright, and can be read with a rhythm. In a long historical period, It affects poets and writers, and the works of poets and writers affect the language of the people. Idioms are basically derived from ancient books and the spoken language of the people, so most idioms have four characters.
Moreover, the idiom must be able to express profound and complex thoughts, but also be extremely summarized and concise. It cannot be too long or short, and four characters are most suitable.
Idioms have a fixed structure, and their structure and components cannot be changed or changed at will. Some idioms have a set of synonyms or antonyms. For example, "yan" and "yu" in "Sanyan Liangyu" are words with similar meanings; "big" and "small", "same" and "different" in "大 Same and Small Differences" are antonyms, and these cannot be replaced casually. For another example, "strange" and "different" in "fancy clothes" have synonymous meanings, and "fancy clothes" and "clothes" have synonyms. Some people write "fancy clothes" as "fancy clothes". On the surface, it seems to be just a typo, but in fact it reflects that there is no Figure out the structure of the idiom. For example, "two tigers fighting against each other" cannot be said to be "three tigers fighting against each other", "Southern accent and Northern accent" cannot be said to be "Eastern accent and Western accent", and "blind man and blind horse" cannot be said to be "blind man and blind donkey".
There are many words with a four-character structure. Some people named them "four-character grid". Some of them were originally idioms, and some were not. After being used for a long time, they became idioms. Many of our current idioms developed in this way.
2. The origin of idioms
Idioms all have origins. One is from the spoken language of the masses, and the other is from writing, which is documented. First, we introduce idioms from the spoken language of the masses. 3. Why are most idioms composed of four characters?
Why has the four-character pattern become the main format of Chinese idioms? Open any Chinese idiom dictionary and most of what we see are four-character idioms.
Take the popular "Modern Chinese Idioms Dictionary" (updated edition, published by Shanghai Education Press) as an example. The dictionary contains 8,700 idioms, including four-character idioms. There are 8,420 idioms, accounting for about 90%. People will naturally ask this question: Why has the four-character pattern become the main format of Chinese idioms? This can be answered from the following aspects.
1. As the main format of Chinese idioms, the four-character pattern conforms to the efficiency principle of language communication. It should be the efficiency principle of language communication to convey as much information as possible in as concise language as possible. In short, " Concise and concise.” Whether Chinese idioms are directly quoted from ancient poems, summarized from ancient myths, fables, historical stories, etc., or processed from sentences in ancient poems, their content is quite rich and profound.
Considering the effectiveness of language communication, idioms need an optimal language form that can not only contain complex and complete meanings, but also be concise and concise. As we all know, an idiom is a special fixed phrase, which is a complete unity in meaning. It often cannot be separated and interpreted in isolation. In use, its function is equivalent to a word, so it is actually a stereotype. Morpheme combination.
The vast majority of Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic, which are expressed in writing as individual Chinese characters. Therefore, the number of words is a factor that must be considered in order to be concise and concise. We might as well imagine what it would be like if most Chinese idioms had less than four characters or more than four characters.
Take "the fox pretends to be the tiger's power", "besieged on all sides", and "out of reach" as examples. The rich connotations they contain cannot be clearly expressed in just two words. Using three words, it is written as "fake power", "song from all sides" and "out of reach of the whip". It is simple but the meaning is not clear.
(A few idioms actually need three characters to fully express their meaning. People extend it to a four-character format for aesthetic reasons, such as "hands-on-hands - fighting at short range", "not surprising - not surprising" ", then let's discuss it separately) If it is written as "the power of a fox pretending to be a tiger", "embarrassed on all sides", "although the whip is not as long as a horse's belly", the information capacity will not increase much, but it will appear redundant and cumbersome. It can be seen that the four-character format is the best format for concise and comprehensive language.
So, why the four-character idioms can be concise and comprehensive should be examined from the relevant characteristics of the Chinese language itself. First of all, most of the "characters" that make up four-character idioms are monosyllabic morphemes.
They integrate shape, sound and meaning, have independent and complete meanings, can be used freely or relatively freely, participate in the formation of various words, and have a large information capacity. For example, "seeking truth from facts" is composed of four morphemes, and the meanings of each relatively independent morpheme are organically connected to express a rich and complete meaning.
In particular, idioms such as "The donkey in Guizhou is exhausted", "Waiting for the rabbit", and "Carving a boat to seek a sword" use four morphemes to record a vivid fable story, and then use it as a metaphor to make the idiom contain more than the literal meaning. A richer and deeper meaning. This is undoubtedly due to the advantage of the large meaning capacity of Chinese monosyllabic morphemes.
Secondly, Chinese is a non-morphological language, and the composition of language units mainly relies on word order and function words. Among them, the direct combination using word order as a means is closely related to the concise and comprehensive characteristics of the four-character pattern language.
As long as the various morphemes in an idiom can match each other semantically and conform to logical principles and language habits, they can be flexibly combined without the help of other language components and directly rely on word order to form parallel and main elements. It uses complex and diverse grammatical relations such as predicate, partial positive, predicate-object, predicate-complement, etc. to express rich meanings. For example, "the heart is straight and the mouth is quick" is a parallel relationship formed by the subject-predicate relationship of "mind is straight" and "the mouth is quick"; "the capable person is a teacher" is the partial relationship of "ability person" and the predicate-object relationship of "we are a teacher". The subject-predicate relationship is formed, etc., by the direct combination of each morpheme with the help of word order.
Because of this, it is possible for the small world of four-character idioms to accommodate such flexible and diverse grammatical structures, load such rich information content, and become a concise and concise unity. 2. Four-character idioms have rich aesthetic features and are popular among people. First of all, four-character idioms embody the beauty of balance.
Paying attention to the beauty of balance is a significant tendency in the traditional aesthetic psychology of the Han nation, which is reflected in many fields of Han culture and art. For example, the strict and well-proportioned shelf structure of square Chinese characters, the parallel couplets that commonly appear in ancient poetry, music, and even prose, the strictly balanced and symmetrical pattern of ancient buildings, the emphasis on compactness, symmetry, and stability in calligraphy, seal cutting, and painting, etc., all illustrate Our ancestors paid great attention to the beauty of balance.
This aesthetic tendency will inevitably be projected onto the Chinese language as one of the cultural carriers of the Han nation, including people's choice of idiom formats. The four-character idioms have four syllables in pronunciation; they have four square Chinese characters in form; and the rhythm of the morpheme arrangement is mostly a combination of two and two, such as "dragons and phoenixes dance", "hundreds of rivers return to the sea", and "beat the case to be amazing" etc.; in terms of grammatical structure, there are a large number of parallel structures, such as "reasonable", "ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign", "a thousand words", etc., all showing the strong beauty of symmetry and balance.
This makes the four-character idiom satisfy people's requirements for balanced beauty to a large extent. Secondly, the four-character idiom has the beauty of change.
Equilibrium does not mean negating change. People not only pay attention to the beauty of balance but also pursue the beauty of change. They seek change on the basis of balance and achieve balance in change.
For example, the changes in tones and tones of ancient metrical poems and the length and short sentences of words; running script and cursive script in calligraphy art; cornices, curved corridors, arch bridges in architectural art, etc. are all examples of the pursuit of intricate changes in balance. This pursuit of the beauty of change also profoundly affects people's choice of idiom format.
The intricate changes in the four-character idioms are reflected in the pronunciation. The tones of each character in the idiom can form changes in tones, forming ups and downs, such as "feel like old friends at first sight" (ping chei ping che), "big book special book" "(绻平廄平), "bizarre" (平廄廄平), "ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign" (组平平廄), etc.; reflected in the rhythm of the arrangement of morphemes, in addition to the vertical two-two combinations, one-three combinations can also be formed , such as "danger/is at stake", "the wood/has become a boat", "as vast as the sea of ??smoke", the combination of three-one, such as "a belt of water", "running in the opposite direction".
4. Why do most idioms have four characters?
Idioms are ready-made idioms, short sentences composed of fixed words that the people have been accustomed to in their long-term lives. There are a large number of idioms in the Chinese vocabulary. They all have certain The origin of idioms, once formed and appeared, has been used by the people for a long time. 1. Characteristics of idioms. Idioms mainly have two characteristics. The first characteristic is that they have a long history. ⑴ Yuanyuan. Refers to the historical nature of the idiom's use, such as : The idiom "have nothing to fear" was first seen in "Zuo Zhuan·The Twenty-Sixth Year of Duke Xi" "The room is like a hanging house with no grass in the field, how can one have confidence and not be afraid" has been in use for more than 2,000 years. "To alert the snake to the grass" comes from the Tang Dynasty In a story written by Duan Chengshi of the Chao Dynasty, the sentence "Although you are cutting grass, I have frightened the snake" has been used for at least a thousand years. "Searching for wind and shadow" first appeared in Zhu Xi's "Zhu Zi Quanshu Xue Yi" in the Song Dynasty, and "two-faced and three-faced" first appeared in "Yuan Opera Hui Lan Ji" and "Nan Qian Bei Diao" first appeared in "Yan Jing Sui Shi Ji" written by Fucha Dunchong in the Qing Dynasty. These idioms have a history of one to two hundred or even eight or nine hundred years. (2) It has a long history. Refers to the social nature of the use of idioms. Idioms are accepted by the people and widely used in writing or orally. Like some idioms from ancient poems, they are the original texts intercepted from poems of different eras, because they may have profound meanings , or vivid images, are the aphorisms and famous lines of the whole poem, which are loved by the people, widely used and recited, and spread. For example, "The spring breeze is proud", "The beauty is equally divided", "The rain is about to come, the wind fills the building", "The wine and meat in the Zhumen are smelly, the road is full" "The bones are frozen to death", "Wildfire burns endlessly, but the spring breeze blows and revives", etc. The second characteristic is that the stereotype remains unchanged. Idiom is a stereotyped fixed phrase, most of which are composed of four characters. Of course, three characters, There are also five words or even more words, such as "a fleeting smoke", "reaching a higher level", "thousands of sails passing by the side of the sunken boat, thousands of spring trees in front of the diseased tree", "don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you", etc. , but this is a minority after all. Why do most idioms have four characters? This is related to the characteristics of the Chinese language. Most of the syllables spoken by the Han nationality are in pairs. Chinese pays attention to four tones, which can produce a sense of beauty in sound when read. The structure of the four characters can adapt to various changes in the tones. The 305 poems in "The Book of Songs", the earliest collection of poems in the history of Chinese literature, are basically all four-character sentences. This kind of four-character sentences has a short and concise structure, lively and bright, and is read in a rhythmic way. In a long historical stage later, , influencing poets and writers, and the works of poets and writers also influence the language of the people. Idioms are basically derived from ancient books and the spoken language of the people, so idioms usually have four characters. And idioms must be able to express profound and complex The idea must be extremely summarized and concise, neither too long nor too short. Four words are most suitable. Idioms have a fixed structure, and its structure and components cannot be changed or changed at will. Some idioms have a set of synonyms or antonyms. For example, "yan" and "yu" in "三言语" are words with similar meanings; "big" and "small", "same" and "different" in "大同小同" are antonyms, and these cannot be replaced casually. For another example, "strange" and "different" in "fancy clothes" have synonymous meanings, and "fancy clothes" and "clothes" have synonyms. Some people write "fancy clothes" as "fancy clothes". On the surface, it seems to be just a typo, but in fact it reflects that there is no Clarify the structure of the idiom. For example, "two tigers fighting" cannot be said as "three tigers fighting", "Southern accent and northern accent" cannot be said as "Eastern accent and western accent", and "blind man blind horse" cannot be said "blind man blind donkey" There are many words with a four-character structure. Some people specially named them "four-character grid". Some of them were originally idioms, and some were not. After being used for a long time, they became idioms. Many of our idioms now develop in this way. Come. 2. The origin of idioms Idioms all have their origins. One is from the spoken language of the masses, and the other is from written language. There are documented cases. First, I will introduce the idioms that come from the spoken language of the masses.