[Pacestor for learning Northeastern dialect] 2021/11/02 Why is Northeastern dialect prone to human-to-human transmission

Address of this podcast

It's been less than a month since this podcast was launched, and some people have already reported to me that I'm starting to feel like a big ballast, but I don't feel it at all. If you think about it carefully, maybe this is quite a point in the Northeast, because in the stereotype of social networks, people in the Northeast feel that they speak Mandarin. Let me just chat today about why Northeastern dialect is prone to human-to-human transmission.

First, an explanation model is introduced, which is a very classic game, "Plague Company". In this game, players play the role of pathogen developers, and the winning condition is that the pathogen you represent can successfully infect the world and wipe out all mankind. As far as my own game experience is concerned, I only need to do two steps to clear the customs: the first step is to obtain enough hosts; the second step is to take these hosts away in a wave before the vaccine is developed. .

How do these two steps work? I usually pretend to be a minor disease first, so that the symptoms of the host are extremely mild, so as not to cause alertness; but at the same time, I continue to strengthen my quality and improve my adaptability to various environments, and the tropics can also If you go, you can go to the frigid zone, you can live in the air, you can live in the water, and in short, you can open the transmission channels. When I have almost completed the enclosure, and then mutate and deteriorate rapidly, it will catch humans by surprise, so that I can harvest efficiently.

If the Northeast dialect is a pathogen, then it is obviously a textbook first step, and then I will explain the characteristics one by one.

✿ Subtle differences between Northeastern and Mandarin

Let's talk about why Northeastern dialect can be disguised as a minor illness.

Northeastern dialect, the scientific name is Northeastern Mandarin, which is a variant of Mandarin. Mandarin is the most widely distributed branch of Chinese dialects. It is widely used in northern and southwestern my country. Modern Standard Chinese also evolved from Mandarin. To put it simply, there are many commonalities between the Mandarin dialects and Putonghua in various places, at most only the difference in tones and some words. The Northeast Mandarin, compared to the Northwest Mandarin and Southwest Mandarin, has the smallest tonal difference between Mandarin and Mandarin. This is the reason why many Northeasterners feel that they speak Mandarin.

To explain the tonal difference between Northeastern dialect and Mandarin, it is necessary to introduce the fifth-degree notation method, which is a method of recording language tones invented by Zhao Yuanren in 1920. It can visually show the relative pitch between tones, and the highest is recorded as 5. The lowest is recorded as 1, and it can be understood according to the floor. In Mandarin, the pitch value of the first tone is the highest, the starting point is the 5th floor, and the end point is also the 5th floor. There is no change in the middle, neither rising nor falling, so its pitch representation is a straight line. The second sound, the starting point is the 3rd floor and the end point is the 5th floor, showing an upward trend, so its pitch representation is a rising short line. The third tone is the most varied. The starting point is the 2nd floor. First go down to the 1st floor, then go up to the 4th floor. There is a turning point in the middle, so its pitch is a line that first falls and then rises. Polyline. For the fourth tone, the starting point is the 5th floor and the end point is the 1st floor, showing a downward trend, so its pitch representation is a falling short line. This may not sound intuitive, but friends who have learned Chinese Pinyin in elementary school can understand what the diacritics mean by writing it down, which is a sign of the changing trend.

The change trend of the four tones in Northeastern dialect is the same as that in Mandarin, the same tone does not rise and does not fall, the second tone rises, the third tone first falls and then rises, and the fourth tone falls. However, the pitch of the tones is different. The tone of "one" in Northeastern dialect is low, it is 55 in Mandarin, and maybe only 33 in Northeastern dialect, while the second tones, three tones, and four tones are basically unchanged. There are parts with a tone value above 3. Put it together with a bang, and the smell of big ballast comes out.

So this is where the Northeast dialect is the most dominant. Many people think that it has a different tone from Mandarin, but they can't tell what the difference is. If you don’t understand the boundaries, you will be easily paralyzed over time, and you will be easily infected by the Northeast dialect without knowing it, because you don’t think it is an invading foreign object. What we're talking about here is not even active imitation, but passive contagion. We humans will subconsciously adjust our voice to align with the surrounding environment. Some papers have studied this phenomenon, so I won't expand it here.

✿ Huge exposure of Northeastern dialect

Going back to the idea of "Plague Company", I just said that the symptoms are extremely mild and will not cause alarm. Next, I will talk about how to open the transmission channel.

As we all know, the most famous specialty of the Northeast is comedy. Since the Spring Festival Gala in 1983, the sketch has a total of one stone, and the Northeast has only eight buckets. Why does this phenomenon occur? I think on the one hand it has to do with the audience. After all, the Spring Festival Gala is mainly for audiences in the north and is a passable area of Mandarin. It must be a very important consideration to choose a dialect accent that can be understood in the area. This is a historical itinerary, another On the one hand, the Northeast has indeed benefited from the personal efforts of comedian talents, such as Zhao Benshan, Huang Hong, Pan Changjiang, Fan Wei, Chen Peisi, Gong Hanlin, these are comedy big names born and raised in the black land, and like my parents, they are very much looking forward to the Spring Festival Gala. Even if they are southerners, who can refuse a group of excellent actors who try their best to make you laugh?

The sketch was formed and developed by the east wind of the Spring Festival Gala. It mixed the characteristics of some drama forms including drama and two-person play. It can be said that it is genetically very close to the Northeast, so it has gradually become a main battlefield for the export of Northeast culture. It is a very crucial step to make the Northeast dialect a symbol of comedy. The male cat said that maybe because the Northeast is an area with relatively early industrialization and urbanization, people will start to engage in two-person transfer or something after they have finished their work and have nothing to do. However, I raised a question about this point. In fact, the relatively developed economy will have this tendency. You can see that we also have a famous sitcom in Guangdong "The Foreign Wife and Local Lang", but why did Cantonese not use these programs to go north? Diffusion is mainly because its learning threshold is too high, and people can't understand it. The male cat said, yes, some of the most well-known Cantonese words in the country are still spread through the Northeast sketches, such as "My Hen" - this is from the 2004 Spring Festival Gala sketch "Outlander in the City".

In addition to gaining exposure on large-scale public media such as CCTV and seizing the cultural life of the people, the Northeast dialect has also traveled southward along with the population flowing out of the three eastern provinces to all parts of the country. This is not to say that the number of people flowing out of the three eastern provinces is among the best in the country, because Anhui, Jiangxi, etc. are also large provinces with large population flowing out, but why we have not studied the dialects of these provinces today. The phenomenon of human-to-human transmission may be related to the language It is related to the strength of the culture itself.

Even in the Internet age, the dominance of the Spring Festival Gala in the field of cultural life has gradually declined, but comedian talents in the Northeast have found a wider world, flocking to various short videos, live broadcast rooms, and talk show stages, which can deter people across the country. It is said that it is not decreasing but increasing.

✿ When Dongbei becomes a meme

Going back to the game settings of "Plague Inc.", players can choose the difficulty mode. For example, the simple mode means that ordinary residents never wash their hands or wear masks, and doctors only work half a day every day. And what Northeastern dialect faces in our real world, I think, is also a simple model, because when it becomes a comedy symbol, people will spontaneously imitate it and be infected by it voluntarily.

This leads to a concept called a "meme," coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 from his book The Selfish Gene. In Chapter 11, Dawkins argues that cultural transmission, like heredity, can lead to some form of evolution, that language "evolves" through non-genetic means, and that this rate is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution . Genetic evolution relies on genes, so what is the transmission unit of non-genetic evolution? Dawkins imitated the form of "gene" and gave it a name called "meme", meme.

There is this passage in the book: "Memes should be seen as a living structure, which is not just a metaphor, but has its academic meaning. When you transplant a living meme into my When you think about it, you actually turned my brain into a host for this meme, making it a vehicle for spreading this meme, just like the genetic machinery of a virus parasitizing a host cell."

This meme theory also has a biological basis, the mirror neurons in our body. Simply put, this neuron allows us to spontaneously imitate a cultural meme and become part of a certain chain of communication. What kind of memes are the easiest to reproduce? Thematically, sex, food, and power-related memes are the most powerful, and formally, scandals, anecdotes, and slang can easily turn into memes. So it's only natural that the Northeastern dialect, which is a symbol of comedy, becomes a meme.

✿ Summary

The above are my three guesses on why the Northeast dialect is prone to human-to-human transmission. Ease of learning, high exposure, and matching meme definitions all contribute to the strong contagion of the Northeastern dialect.

So this period ends here. Here is the pacesetter for learning Northeastern dialect, a podcast that studies Northeastern dialect and Northeastern culture. It will be updated once a week if there is no accident. Thanks for listening.