Chapter 17 The technology of writing
I don’t know what those boyars thought, but Peter had already begun to show his father another result.
"Father, how is it?"
Mircea looked at a large piece of paper in front of him. The letters on it looked like those they used, including Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.
"My son, I didn't expect you to bring me more than one surprise."
"From now on Wallachia has a formal writing system."
The Roman Empire's military conquests, the development of trade, and the spread of Christianity in the 2nd century AD promoted the Romanization process in Dacia. In this process, ordinary people gradually came into contact with and became familiar with Latin. Since the communication channels of writing were very limited at that time, the written literary language had little impact on Dacia, and the people accepted Vulgar Latin, which was mainly spoken. Taking Vulgar Latin as the backbone and combining some elements of the original Dacian language, a new universal language-Romanian was formed.
After the Roman Empire withdrew, although Romanian was influenced by various Slavic languages from neighboring countries and absorbed some vocabulary, the foundation of Latin in the backbone of the language has never been shaken. After the 7th century AD, with the formation of the Romanian nation, the Romanian language basically completed its evolution process.
Now it should not be called Romanian, it should be called Wallachian. Because Romania has not yet been established.
Romanian belongs to the Romance language family of the Indo-European language family. Also belonging to this language family are French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Romanian has great vocabulary similarities with other languages in the same language family. For example, Romanian has 77% vocabulary similarity with Italian, 75% vocabulary similarity with French, and 71% vocabulary similarity with Spanish. Among the Romance languages, Romanian belongs to the Eastern branch, and later Romanian languages are written in Latin letters because they are influenced by French, which also belongs to the Latin family. However, Romania is in the Orthodox cultural circle, so it can also be written in Cyrillic letters. (I used to find it strange that Romania is surrounded by East Slavs to the east, West Slavs to the north, and South Slavs to the south. How did they not be assimilated?)
From the 10th to the 12th century, the invasion of Slavic peoples forced the Vlach people living on the south bank of the Danube to migrate southward. They separated from the native people and formed multiple dialects. But they are all inseparable from the local language.
The alphabet shown to Mircea now was written in Cyrillic letters, and there was another alphabet written in Latin letters. If you spoke Latin in Constantinople now, you might get a beating.
"Well, my son. You have done a lot for Wallachia."
"Father, I could have done more for Wallachia."
Grand Duke Mircea decided to promote Wallachian writing, but Peter took the lead and ordered chambers of commerce and ports to use Wallachian writing when doing transactions.
The finalization of Wallachian writing was also a ground-breaking event. When Archduke Mircea showed these writings to Archbishop Carroll, he directly said that they were a miracle from God.
With writing comes printing and copying. Paper is essential, but more for economic reasons than technical reasons. Manuscripts were usually copied on parchment (made from the broken skin of sheep) or vellum (made from calfskin), and block printing could use these materials when the significance of the print was greater than affordability. But a book as thick as the Bible would require up to 170 calfskins or 300 sheepskins, and the lack of paper would render the prevailing mechanical reproduction technology useless, even if it could produce large volumes of books economically and quickly. In the 12th century, the Arabs who obtained technology from China introduced papermaking to Spain. Papermaking developed slowly throughout much of Europe over the next two centuries.
Yes, papermaking, printing, the compass, and gunpowder, the four great inventions, were developing extremely slowly in Eastern Europe at this time. Peter had to do it himself.
Because the Islamic regime in the Middle East prevents the secrets of papermaking from being leaked, it is not feasible to produce it through external forces. However, can this stump him?
Cai Lun of the Eastern Han Dynasty used rags, broken fishing nets and other items to create paper that was easier to write on. After that, people also summarized four steps.
The first is the separation of raw materials, which is to use soaking or cooking methods to degumm the raw materials and disperse them into fibers;
The second is pulping, which is to use cutting and pounding methods to cut off the fibers and broom them into pulp;
The third is paper making, that is, the paper pulp is infiltrated into slurry, and then a paper scoop is used to scoop out the pulp, so that the pulp is interwoven into thin sheets of wet paper on the paper scoop;
The fourth is drying, that is, drying the wet paper in the sun or drying it and peeling it off to become paper.
And those things are available in towns and rural areas every day, and the source of raw materials is there.
In addition to paper making, it is movable type printing. The famous Gutenberg in Europe was still a few years away from being born. Now he only prints some copperplates to engrave icons and playing cards, and has no ability to spread knowledge on a large scale.
At this time, movable type printing had been used in the East for more than 300 years. Use clay to make blanks with the same specifications, and engrave reverse single characters on one end. The protrusions of the characters are as high as the thickness of the edge of a copper coin. They are hardened with fire to become a single clay type. In order to meet the needs of typesetting, several or even dozens of commonly used characters are generally prepared for use when they are repeated in the same edition. If you encounter uncommon words that are not commonly used, you can just make them and use them if you have not prepared them in advance.
As long as enough individual movable types are prepared in advance, the plates can be assembled at any time, greatly speeding up the plate-making time. After the movable type plate is printed, it can be dismantled and the movable type can be reused. The movable type takes up less space than the engraving plate and is easy to store and keep. In this way, the superiority of movable type is shown. If you only print two or three copies, it is not easy. If you print hundreds or thousands of copies, the work efficiency will be extremely impressive. It will not only save a lot of manpower and material resources, but also greatly improve the speed and quality of printing.
It will all take time, but Peter is ready.
Moreover, Peter also proposed to Mircea to move the capital. Although Kemplonga is still expanding, if it expands its territory in the future, it will need a better capital.
Mircea thought seriously about this suggestion, but for now he had better get the army in order. After all, this was adopted at the Boyars Conference.