Ok, look, I know nothing about mandarin as a language except the few xianxia words I’ve picked up from reading webnovels. But I do know languages, and I know the way they…drift over long periods of time. So, all the Luo Binghe fics where he comes to modern Beijing, or hell canon with our transmigrators, I’m assuming there’s potentially a thousand years of linguistic drift between Binghe and Shen Yuan. How is it they always understand each other perfectly, just Binghe speaking with archaic phrasing? I know the traditional characters haven’t changed much. But have the sounds of Mandarin really not changed that much in so long? Would it even be Mandarin 1000 years ago or one of the other languages in the Chinese language family?? I know im thinking about this too much, suspension of disbelief yada yada. But this is what I do with fantasy type stories. I enjoy them for a while, then I start going “hey wait, how would this actually work in real life??” Anyway, I need an AU where SY transmigrates and can barely understand what anyone is saying and even doing his best everyone thinks he’s got brain damage because suddenly his pronunciation is DEEPLY weird and he uses nonsense words that don’t exist (yet..). I just think the potential for miscommunication and hijinks is high! (SQH wouldn’t have the same problem because he transmigrates into a baby, so he gets taught the language as a baby as any baby would learn. But SQQ is a full on adult who is already supposed to know how to speak. MQF probably diagnoses him with a stroke or something and YQY personally undertakes to re-teach his precious Xiao Jiu how to speak after his terrible affliction.) I’m just thinking, imagine you’re a common millenial, and you suddenly get transmigrated into Beowulf. You’re only gonna grasp like every third word because the language has changed so much. Unless, it works because PIDW is fake Ancient China, so everyone speaks modern Mandarin. And highly educated Shen Yuan gets transmigrated and spends the next 20 years raging at Airplane “THEY WOULD NOT SAY THAT YOU HACK AUTHOR!!” I think both explanations could be extremely fucking funny actually.