Almost all
lexemes in
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...
are individual characters one spoken syllable in length. This contrasts with modern Chinese dialects where two-syllable words are extremely common. Chinese has acquired many polysyllabic words in order to disambiguate monosyllabic words that sounded different in earlier forms of Chinese but identical in one region or another during later periods. Because Classical Chinese is based on the literary examples of ancient Chinese literature, it has almost none of the two-syllable words present in modern
varieties of Chinese
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the m ...
.
Classical Chinese has more
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...
s compared to the modern vernacular. In particular, whereas Mandarin has one general character to refer to the first-person pronoun, Literary Chinese has several, many of which are used as part of
honorific language, and several of which have different grammatical uses (first-person collective, first-person possessive, etc.).
In
syntax
In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...
, Classical Chinese words are not restrictively categorized into
parts of speech
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...
: nouns used as verbs, adjectives used as nouns, and so on. There is no
copula in Classical Chinese; () is a copula in modern Chinese but in old Chinese it was originally a near
demonstrative
Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning ...
('this'), the modern Chinese equivalent of which is ().
Beyond grammar and vocabulary differences, Classical Chinese can be distinguished by literary and cultural differences: an effort to maintain
parallelism and rhythm, even in prose works, and extensive use of literary and cultural allusions, thereby also contributing to brevity.
Many final particles () and interrogative particles are found in Literary Chinese.
Function words
Content words
As with function words, there are many differences between the content words of Classical Chinese and those of Baihua. Below are synonyms used in the two registers. Some Classical Chinese words can have more than one meaning.
However, Classical Chinese words still exist among many ''
chengyu
''Chengyu'' ( zh, t=, s=, first=t, p=chéngyǔ, tr=set phrase) are a type of traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. ''Chengyu'' were widely used in Literary Chinese and are still common in ...
'', or Chinese idioms.
The Classical Chinese words and examples will be written in
traditional characters
Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to write Chinese languages. In Taiwan, the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in the ''Standard Form of ...
, and the modern vernacular will be written in both
simplified and traditional characters.
See also
*
Chinese adjectives
*
Chinese particles
*
Chinese verbs
*
Classical Chinese grammar
Sources
Citations
Works cited
*《新高中文言手册》 （1998年 北京华书）
*《新华字典》 （第10版
Further reading
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External links
{{wikibooks, Classical Chinese
Chinese grammar
Classical Chinese