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Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all 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 ...
. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following
Zhou dynasty The Zhou dynasty ( ) was a royal dynasty of China that existed for 789 years from until 256 BC, the longest span of any dynasty in Chinese history. During the Western Zhou period (771 BC), the royal house, surnamed Ji, had military ...
. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the '' Analects'', the ''
Mencius Mencius (孟子, ''Mèngzǐ'', ; ) was a Chinese Confucian philosopher, often described as the Second Sage () to reflect his traditional esteem relative to Confucius himself. He was part of Confucius's fourth generation of disciples, inheriting ...
'', and the '' Zuo Zhuan''. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or
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 ...
), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of
Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...
, including oracle bone,
bronze Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals (such as phosphorus) or metalloid ...
, and
seal script Seal script or sigillary script () is a Chinese script styles, style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of bronze script during the Zhou dynasty (1 ...
s. Throughout the Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word. Although the script is not alphabetic, the majority of characters were created based on phonetic considerations. At first, words that were difficult to represent visually were written using a "borrowed" character for a similar-sounding word ( rebus principle). Later on, to reduce ambiguity, new characters were created for these phonetic borrowings by appending a radical that conveys a broad semantic category, resulting in compound ''xingsheng'' ( phono-semantic) characters. For the earliest attested stage of Old Chinese of the late Shang dynasty, the phonetic information implicit in these ''xingsheng'' characters which are grouped into phonetic series, known as the ''xiesheng'' series'','' represents the only direct source of phonological data for reconstructing the language. The corpus of ''xingsheng'' characters was greatly expanded in the following Zhou dynasty. In addition, the rhymes of the earliest recorded poems, primarily those of the ''
Classic of Poetry The ''Classic of Poetry'', also ''Shijing'' or ''Shih-ching'', translated variously as the ''Book of Songs'', ''Book of Odes'', or simply known as the ''Odes'' or ''Poetry'' (; ''Shī''), is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, co ...
'', provide an extensive source of phonological information with respect to syllable finals for the Central Plains dialects during the
Western Zhou The Western Zhou ( zh, c=西周, p=Xīzhōu; 771 BC) was a period of Chinese history corresponding roughly to the first half of the Zhou dynasty. It began when King Wu of Zhou overthrew the Shang dynasty at the Battle of Muye and ended in 77 ...
and
Spring and Autumn period The Spring and Autumn period () was a period in History of China, Chinese history corresponding roughly to the first half of the Eastern Zhou (256 BCE), characterized by the gradual erosion of royal power as local lords nominally subject t ...
s. Similarly, the '' Chu Ci'' provides rhyme data for the dialect spoken in the Chu region during the
Warring States period The Warring States period in history of China, Chinese history (221 BC) comprises the final two and a half centuries of the Zhou dynasty (256 BC), which were characterized by frequent warfare, bureaucratic and military reforms, and ...
. These rhymes, together with clues from the phonetic components of ''xingsheng'' characters, allow most characters attested in Old Chinese to be assigned to one of 30 or 31 rhyme groups. For late Old Chinese of the Han period, the modern
Southern Min Southern Min (), Minnan ( Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwa ...
languages, the oldest layer of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, and a few early transliterations of foreign proper names, as well as names for non-native flora and fauna, also provide insights into language reconstruction. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differed from
Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese language, Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expande ...
in lacking
retroflex A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...
and palatal
obstruent An obstruent ( ) is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well ...
s but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and
liquids Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usually close to th ...
. Most recent reconstructions also describe Old Chinese as a language without tones, but having consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, which developed into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Most researchers trace the core vocabulary of Old Chinese to Sino-Tibetan, with much early borrowing from neighbouring languages. During the Zhou period, the originally monosyllabic vocabulary was augmented with polysyllabic words formed by compounding and
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...
, although monosyllabic vocabulary was still predominant. Unlike Middle Chinese and the modern Chinese languages, Old Chinese had a significant amount of derivational morphology. Several
affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...
es have been identified, including ones for the verbification of nouns, conversion between transitive and intransitive verbs, and formation of causative verbs. Like modern Chinese, it appears to be uninflected, though a pronoun case and number system seems to have existed during the Shang and early Zhou but was already in the process of disappearing by the Classical period. Likewise, by the Classical period, most morphological derivations had become unproductive or vestigial, and grammatical relationships were primarily indicated using word order and
grammatical particle In grammar, the term ''particle'' ( abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word (functor) associated with another word or phrase in order to impart meaning. Alth ...
s.


Classification

Middle Chinese and its southern neighbours Kra–Dai, Hmong–Mien and the Vietic branch of Austroasiatic have similar tone systems, syllable structure, grammatical features and lack of inflection, but these are believed to be areal features spread by diffusion rather than indicating common descent. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, together with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the
Himalayas The Himalayas, or Himalaya ( ), is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the Earth's highest peaks, including the highest, Mount Everest. More than list of h ...
and the Southeast Asian Massif. The evidence consists of some hundreds of proposed cognate words, including such basic vocabulary as the following: Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as
Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...
or Austronesian. Although Old Chinese is by far the earliest attested member of the family, its logographic script does not clearly indicate the pronunciation of words. Other difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are poorly described because they are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, including several sensitive border zones. Initial consonants generally correspond regarding place and
manner of articulation articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators ( speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...
, but voicing and aspiration are much less regular, and prefixal elements vary widely between languages. Some researchers believe that both these phenomena reflect lost minor syllables. Proto-Tibeto-Burman as reconstructed by Benedict and Matisoff lacks an aspiration distinction on initial stops and affricates. Aspiration in Old Chinese often corresponds to pre-initial consonants in Tibetan and Lolo-Burmese, and is believed to be a Chinese innovation arising from earlier prefixes. Proto-Sino-Tibetan is reconstructed with a six-vowel system as in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, with the
Tibeto-Burman languages The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people spe ...
distinguished by the
merger Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of a company, business organization, or one of their operating units is transferred to or consolidated with another entity. They may happen through direct absorpt ...
of the mid-central vowel with . The other vowels are preserved by both, with some alternation between and , and between and .


Texts

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at the Yinxu site near modern
Anyang Anyang ( zh, s=安阳, t=安陽; ) is a prefecture-level city in Henan, China. Geographical coordinates are 35° 41'~ 36° 21' north latitude and 113° 38'~ 114° 59' east longitude. The northernmost city in Henan, Anyang borders Puyang to the eas ...
identified as the last capital of the
Shang dynasty The Shang dynasty (), also known as the Yin dynasty (), was a Chinese royal dynasty that ruled in the Yellow River valley during the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Western Zhou d ...
, and date from about 1250 BC. These are the oracle bones, short inscriptions carved on turtle plastrons and ox scapulae for divinatory purposes, as well as a few brief bronze inscriptions. The language written is undoubtedly an early form of Chinese, but is difficult to interpret due to the limited subject matter and high proportion of proper names. Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty. Little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on
grammatical particle In grammar, the term ''particle'' ( abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word (functor) associated with another word or phrase in order to impart meaning. Alth ...
s than Classical Chinese. From early in the
Western Zhou The Western Zhou ( zh, c=西周, p=Xīzhōu; 771 BC) was a period of Chinese history corresponding roughly to the first half of the Zhou dynasty. It began when King Wu of Zhou overthrew the Shang dynasty at the Battle of Muye and ended in 77 ...
period, around 1000 BC, the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions, many of considerable length. These texts are found throughout the Zhou area. Although their language changed over time, it was highly uniform across this range at each point in time, suggesting that it reflected the prestige form used by the Zhou elite. Even longer pre-Classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition. The oldest sections of the '' Book of Documents'', the ''
Classic of Poetry The ''Classic of Poetry'', also ''Shijing'' or ''Shih-ching'', translated variously as the ''Book of Songs'', ''Book of Odes'', or simply known as the ''Odes'' or ''Poetry'' (; ''Shī''), is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, co ...
'' and the ''
I Ching The ''I Ching'' or ''Yijing'' ( ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. The ''I Ching'' was originally a divination manual in ...
'', also date from the early Zhou period, and closely resemble the bronze inscriptions in vocabulary, syntax, and style. A greater proportion of this more varied vocabulary has been identified than for the oracular period. The four centuries preceding the unification of China in 221 BC (the later
Spring and Autumn period The Spring and Autumn period () was a period in History of China, Chinese history corresponding roughly to the first half of the Eastern Zhou (256 BCE), characterized by the gradual erosion of royal power as local lords nominally subject t ...
and the
Warring States period The Warring States period in history of China, Chinese history (221 BC) comprises the final two and a half centuries of the Zhou dynasty (256 BC), which were characterized by frequent warfare, bureaucratic and military reforms, and ...
) constitute the Chinese classical period in the strict sense. There are many bronze inscriptions from this period, but they are vastly outweighed by a rich literature written in ink on
bamboo and wooden slips Bamboo and wooden strips ( zh, s=简牍, t=簡牘, first=t, p=jiǎndú) are long, narrow strips of wood or bamboo, each typically holding a single column of several dozen brush-written characters. They were the main media for writing documents ...
and (toward the end of the period) silk. Although these are perishable materials, a significant number of texts were transmitted as copies, and a few of these survived to the present day as the received classics. Works from this period, including the '' Analects'', the ''
Mencius Mencius (孟子, ''Mèngzǐ'', ; ) was a Chinese Confucian philosopher, often described as the Second Sage () to reflect his traditional esteem relative to Confucius himself. He was part of Confucius's fourth generation of disciples, inheriting ...
'' and the '' Commentary of Zuo'', have been admired as models of prose style by later generations. As a result, the syntax and vocabulary of Old Chinese was preserved in Literary Chinese (''wenyan''), the standard for formal writing in China and neighboring
Sinosphere The Sinosphere, also known as the Chinese cultural sphere, East Asian cultural sphere, or the Sinic world, encompasses multiple countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia that were historically heavily influenced by Chinese culture. The Sinosph ...
countries until the early 20th century.


Script

Each character of the script represented a single Old Chinese
morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...
, originally identical to a word. Most scholars believe that these words were monosyllabic. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart propose that some words consisted of a minor syllable followed by a full syllable, as in modern Khmer, but still written with a single character. The development of characters to signify the words of the language follows the same three stages that characterized
Egyptian hieroglyphs Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct char ...
,
Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...
n
cuneiform script Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...
and the Maya script. Some words could be represented by pictures (later stylized) such as 'sun', 'person' and 'tree, wood', by abstract symbols such as 'three' and 'up', or by composite symbols such as 'forest' (two trees). About 1,000 of the oracle bone characters, nearly a quarter of the total, are of this type, though 300 of them have not yet been deciphered. Though the pictographic origins of these characters are apparent, they have already undergone extensive simplification and conventionalization. Evolved forms of most of these characters are still in common use today. Next, words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles, were signified by borrowing characters of pictorial origin representing similar-sounding words (the "
rebus A rebus ( ) is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+ ...
strategy"): * The word 'tremble' was originally written with the character for 'chestnut'. 403; . * The pronoun and modal particle was written with the character originally representing 'winnowing basket'. 952; . Sometimes the borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with 'don't', a borrowing of 'mother'. Later, phonetic loans were systematically disambiguated by the addition of semantic indicators, usually to the less common word: * The word 'tremble' was later written with the character , formed by adding the symbol , a variant of 'heart'. * The less common original word 'winnowing basket' came to be written with the compound , obtained by adding the symbol 'bamboo' to the character. Such phono-semantic compound characters were already used extensively on the oracle bones, and the vast majority of characters created since then have been of this type. In the ''
Shuowen Jiezi The ''Shuowen Jiezi'' is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen , during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the ''Erya'' (), the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' contains the ...
'', a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century, 82% of the 9,353 characters are classified as phono-semantic compounds. In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds also have a phonetic nature. These developments were already present in the oracle bone script, possibly implying a significant period of development prior to the extant inscriptions. This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character 'records'. The character is thought to depict bamboo or wooden strips tied together with leather thongs, a writing material known from later archaeological finds. Development and simplification of the script continued during the pre-Classical and Classical periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles. The language developed compound words, though almost all constituent morphemes could also be used as independent words. Hundreds of morphemes of two or more syllables also entered the language, and were written with one phono-semantic compound character per syllable. During the
Warring States period The Warring States period in history of China, Chinese history (221 BC) comprises the final two and a half centuries of the Zhou dynasty (256 BC), which were characterized by frequent warfare, bureaucratic and military reforms, and ...
, writing became more widespread, with further simplification and variation, particularly in the eastern states. The most conservative script prevailed in the western state of Qin, which would later impose its standard on the whole of China.


Phonology

Old Chinese phonology has been reconstructed using a unique method relying on textual sources. The starting point is the '' Qieyun'' dictionary (601 AD), which classifies the reading pronunciation of each character found in texts to that time within a precise, but abstract, phonological system. Scholars have sought to assign phonetic values to these
Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese language, Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expande ...
categories by comparing them with 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 ...
, Sino-Xenic pronunciations and transcriptions. Next, the phonology of Old Chinese is reconstructed by comparing the ''Qieyun'' categories to the rhyming practice of the ''Classic of Poetry'' (early 1st millennium BC) and the shared phonetic components of Chinese characters, some of which are slightly older. More recent efforts have supplemented this method with evidence from Old Chinese
derivational morphology Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as For example, ''unhappy'' and ''happiness'' derive from the root word ''happy.'' It is differentiat ...
, from Chinese varieties preserving distinctions not found in the ''Qieyun'', such as Min and Waxiang, and from early transcriptions and loans. Although many details are still disputed, recent formulations are in substantial agreement on the core issues. For example, the Old Chinese initial consonants recognized by Li Fang-Kuei and William Baxter are given below, with Baxter's (mostly tentative) additions given in parentheses: Various initial clusters have been proposed, especially clusters of with other consonants, but this area remains unsettled. Bernhard Karlgren and many later scholars posited the medials , and the combination to explain the retroflex and palatal
obstruent An obstruent ( ) is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well ...
s of Middle Chinese, as well as many of its vowel contrasts. is generally accepted. However, although the distinction denoted by is universally accepted, its realization as a palatal glide has been challenged on a number of grounds, and a variety of different realizations have been used in recent constructions. Reconstructions since the 1980s usually propose six 
vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s: Vowels could optionally be followed by the same codas as in Middle Chinese: a glide or , a nasal , or , or a stop , or . Some scholars also allow for a labiovelar coda . Most scholars now believe that Old Chinese lacked the tones found in later stages of the language, but had optional post-codas and , which developed into the Middle Chinese rising and departing tones respectively.


Grammar

Little is known of the grammar of the language of the Oracular and pre-Classical periods, as the texts are often of a ritual or formulaic nature, and much of their vocabulary has not been deciphered. In contrast, the rich literature of the
Warring States period The Warring States period in history of China, Chinese history (221 BC) comprises the final two and a half centuries of the Zhou dynasty (256 BC), which were characterized by frequent warfare, bureaucratic and military reforms, and ...
has been extensively analysed. Having no
inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
, Old Chinese was heavily reliant on word order,
grammatical particle In grammar, the term ''particle'' ( abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word (functor) associated with another word or phrase in order to impart meaning. Alth ...
s, and inherent word classes.


Word classes

Classifying Old Chinese words is not always straightforward, as words were not marked for function, word classes overlapped, and words of one class could sometimes be used in roles normally reserved for a different class. The task is more difficult with written texts than it would have been for speakers of Old Chinese, because the derivational morphology is often hidden by the writing system. For example, the verb 'to block' and the derived noun 'frontier' were both written with the same character .
Personal pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it''). Personal pronouns may also take different f ...
s exhibit a wide variety of forms in Old Chinese texts, possibly due to dialectal variation. There were two groups of first-person pronouns: * , , and * , and In the oracle bone inscriptions, the pronouns were used by the king to refer to himself, and the forms for the Shang people as a whole. This distinction is largely absent in later texts, and the forms disappeared during the classical period. In the post-Han period, (modern Mandarin ) came to be used as the general first-person pronoun. Second-person pronouns included , , and . The forms and continued to be used interchangeably until their replacement by the northwestern variant (modern Mandarin ) in the Tang period. However, in some Min dialects the second-person pronoun is derived from . Case distinctions were particularly marked among third-person pronouns. There was no third-person subject pronoun, but , originally a distal
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 ...
, came to be used as a third-person object pronoun in the classical period. The possessive pronoun was originally , replaced in the classical period by . In the post-Han period, came to be used as the general third-person pronoun. It survives in some Wu dialects, but has been replaced by a variety of forms elsewhere. There were demonstrative and interrogative pronouns, but no indefinite pronouns with the meanings 'something' or 'nothing'. The distributive pronouns were formed with a suffix: * 'which one' from 'who' * 'each one' from 'all' * 'someone' from 'there is' * 'no-one' from 'there is no' As in the modern language, localizers (compass directions, 'above', 'inside' and the like) could be placed after nouns to indicate relative positions. They could also precede verbs to indicate the direction of the action. Nouns denoting times were another special class (time words); they usually preceded the subject to specify the time of an action. However the classifiers so characteristic of Modern Chinese only became common in the Han period and the subsequent
Northern and Southern dynasties The Northern and Southern dynasties () was a period of political division in the history of China that lasted from 420 to 589, following the tumultuous era of the Sixteen Kingdoms and the Eastern Jin dynasty. It is sometimes considered a ...
. Old Chinese
verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...
s, like their modern counterparts, did not show tense or aspect; these could be indicated with adverbs or particles if required. Verbs could be transitive or intransitive. As in the modern language,
adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...
s were a special kind of intransitive verb, and a few transitive verbs could also function as modal auxiliaries or as
preposition Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...
s.
Adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...
s described the scope of a statement or various temporal relationships. They included two families of negatives starting with and , such as and . Modern northern varieties derive the usual negative from the first family, while southern varieties preserve the second. The language had no adverbs of degree until late in the Classical period.
Particle In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...
s were function words serving a range of purposes. As in the modern language, there were sentence-final particles marking imperatives and yes/no questions. Other sentence-final particles expressed a range of connotations, the most important being , expressing static factuality, and , implying a change. Other particles included the subordination marker and the nominalizing particles (agent) and (object). Conjunctions could join nouns or clauses.


Sentence structure

As with English and modern Chinese, Old Chinese sentences can be analysed as a subject (a noun phrase, sometimes understood) followed by a predicate, which could be of either nominal or verbal type. Before the Classical period, nominal predicates consisted of a copular particle followed by a noun phrase: The negated copula is attested in oracle bone inscriptions, and later fused as . In the Classical period, nominal predicates were constructed with the sentence-final particle instead of the copula , but was retained as the negative form, with which was optional: The copular verb () of Literary and Modern Chinese dates from the Han period. In Old Chinese the word was 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'). As in Modern Chinese, but unlike most Tibeto-Burman languages, the basic word order in a verbal sentence was subject–verb–object: Besides inversions for emphasis, there were two exceptions to this rule: a pronoun object of a negated sentence or an interrogative pronoun object would be placed before the verb: An additional noun phrase could be placed before the subject to serve as the topic. Like the modern language, Old Chinese used ''in situ'' questions, forming yes–no questions by adding a sentence-final particle, and open questions by substituting an interrogative pronoun for the requested element.


Modification

In general, Old Chinese modifiers preceded the words they modified. Thus
relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...
s were placed before the noun, usually marked by the particle (in a role similar to Modern Chinese ''de'' ): A common instance of this construction was adjectival modification, since the Old Chinese adjective was a type of verb (as in the modern language), but was usually omitted after monosyllabic adjectives. Similarly, adverbial modifiers, including various forms of negation, usually occurred before the verb. As in the modern language, time adjuncts occurred either at the start of the sentence or before the verb, depending on their scope, while duration adjuncts were placed after the verb. Instrumental and place adjuncts were usually placed after the verb phrase. These later moved to a position before the verb, as in the modern language.


Vocabulary

The improved understanding of Old Chinese
phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
has enabled the study of the origins of Chinese words (rather than the characters with which they are written). Most researchers trace the core vocabulary to a Sino-Tibetan ancestor language, with much early borrowing from other neighbouring languages. The traditional view was that Old Chinese was an
isolating language Social isolation, Isolation is the near or complete lack of social contact by an individual. Isolation or isolated may also refer to: Sociology and psychology *Social isolation *Isolation (psychology), a defense mechanism in psychoanalytic theo ...
. Linguists still believe that the language lacked
inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
, but it has become clear that words could be formed by derivational affixation, reduplication and compounding.


Loanwords

During the Old Chinese period, Chinese civilization expanded from a compact area around the lower Wei River and middle
Yellow River The Yellow River, also known as Huanghe, is the second-longest river in China and the List of rivers by length, sixth-longest river system on Earth, with an estimated length of and a Drainage basin, watershed of . Beginning in the Bayan H ...
eastwards across the
North China Plain The North China Plain () is a large-scale downfaulted rift basin formed in the late Paleogene and Neogene and then modified by the deposits of the Yellow River. It is the largest alluvial plain of China. The plain is bordered to the north by th ...
to
Shandong Shandong is a coastal Provinces of China, province in East China. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history since the beginning of Chinese civilization along the lower reaches of the Yellow River. It has served as a pivotal cultural ...
and then south into the valley of the Yangtze. There are no records of the non-Chinese languages formerly spoken in those areas and subsequently displaced by the Chinese expansion. However they are believed to have contributed to the vocabulary of Old Chinese, and may be the source of some of the many Chinese words whose origins are still unknown. Jerry Norman and Mei Tsu-lin have identified early Austroasiatic loanwords in Old Chinese, possibly from the peoples of the lower Yangtze basin known to ancient Chinese as the Yue. For example, the early Chinese name ( ) for the Yangtze was later extended to a general word for 'river' in south China. Norman and Mei suggest that the word is cognate with Vietnamese (from *''krong'') and Mon ''kruŋ'' 'river'. Haudricourt and Strecker have proposed a number of borrowings from the Hmong–Mien languages. These include terms related to
rice Rice is a cereal grain and in its Domestication, domesticated form is the staple food of over half of the world's population, particularly in Asia and Africa. Rice is the seed of the grass species ''Oryza sativa'' (Asian rice)—or, much l ...
cultivation, which began in the middle Yangtze valley: * ( ) 'rice seedling' from proto-Hmong–Mien A, * ( ) 'unhulled rice' from proto-Hmong–Mien A. Other words are believed to have been borrowed from languages to the south of the Chinese area, but it is not clear which was the original source, e.g. * ( ) 'elephant' can be compared with Mon ''coiŋ'', proto-Tai and Burmese ''chaŋ''. * ( ) 'chicken' versus proto-Tai , proto-Hmong–Mien and proto-Viet–Muong *''r-ka''. In ancient times, the
Tarim Basin The Tarim Basin is an endorheic basin in Xinjiang, Northwestern China occupying an area of about and one of the largest basins in Northwest China.Chen, Yaning, et al. "Regional climate change and its effects on river runoff in the Tarim Basin, Ch ...
was occupied by speakers of
Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...
Tocharian languages The Tocharian (sometimes ''Tokharian'') languages ( ; ), also known as the ''Arśi-Kuči'', Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean languages, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants o ...
, the source of ( ) 'honey', from proto-Tocharian *''ḿət(ə)'' (where *''ḿ'' is palatalized; cf. Tocharian B ''mit''), cognate with English '. The northern neighbours of Chinese contributed such words as ( ) 'calf' – compare Mongolian ''tuɣul'' and
Manchu The Manchus (; ) are a Tungusic peoples, Tungusic East Asian people, East Asian ethnic group native to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. They are an officially recognized Ethnic minorities in China, ethnic minority in China and the people from wh ...
''tuqšan''.


Affixation

Chinese philologists have long noted words with related meanings and similar pronunciations, sometimes written using the same character. Henri Maspero attributed some of these alternations to consonant clusters resulting from derivational affixes. Subsequent work has identified several such affixes, some of which appear to have cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages. A few of these were still productive or transparent in Old Chinese. A common case is "derivation by tone change", in which words in the departing tone appear to be derived from words in other tones. If Haudricourt's theory of the origin of the departing tone is accepted, these tonal derivations can be interpreted as the result of a derivational suffix with a range of functions. As Tibetan has a similar suffix, it may be inherited from Sino-Tibetan. The most common function was
nominalization In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation, also known as nouning, is the use of a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head (linguistics), head of a noun phrase. This change in functional c ...
of verbs, as in the following examples: * ( ) 'to transmit' and ( ) 'a record' * ( ) 'to bring in' and < ( ) 'inside' * ( ) 'to weave' and ( ) 'silk cloth' (compare Written Tibetan 'to weave' and 'woven, cloth') The suffix also formed denominal verbs, as in these examples: * ( ) 'cap' and ( ) 'to cap' 160a. * ( ) 'clothes' and ( ) 'to wear, to clothe' * ( ) 'king' and ( ) 'be king' Another alternation involves transitive verbs with an unvoiced initial and passive or stative verbs with a voiced initial: * ( ) 'to see' and ( ) 'to appear' * ( ) 'to mix' and ( ) 'mixed, confused' * ( ) 'to stretch' and ( ) 'long' Some scholars hold that the transitive verbs with voiceless initials are basic and the voiced initials reflect a de-transitivizing nasal prefix. Others suggest that the transitive verbs were derived by the addition of a causative prefix to a stative verb, causing devoicing of the following voiced initial. Both postulated prefixes have parallels in other Sino-Tibetan languages, in some of which they are still productive. Several other affixes have been proposed. The derivational affixes lost their productivity towards the end of the Zhou period, and their functions were taken over by forms such as auxiliary verbs.


Reduplication and compounding

Old Chinese morphemes were originally monosyllabic, but during the Western Zhou period many new disyllabic words entered the language. By the classical period, 25–30% of the lexicon was polysyllabic, though monosyllabic words occurred more frequently and made up 80–90% of the text. Disyllabic morphemes include the famous ( ) 'butterfly' from the '' Zhuangzi''. 633h. Many disyllabic, monomorphemic words, particularly names of insects, birds and plants, and expressive adjectives and adverbs, were formed by varieties of
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...
: * full reduplication ( 'repeated words'), in which the syllable is repeated, as in ( ) 'tall and grand' and ( ) 'happy and at ease'. * rhyming semi-reduplication ( 'repeated rhymes'), in which only the final is repeated, as in ( ) 'elegant, beautiful' and ( ) 'bollworm'. The initial of the second syllable is often or . * alliterative semi-reduplication ( 'paired initials'), in which the initial is repeated, as in ( ) 'irregular, uneven' and ( ) 'to crawl'. * vowel alternation, especially of and , as in ( ) 'busy' and ( ) 'carefree and happy'. Alternation between and also occurred, as in ( ) 'rushing (of wind or water)' and ( ) 'cricket'. More words, especially nouns, were formed by compounding, including: * qualification of one noun by another (placed in front), as in ( ) 'quince' (literally 'tree-melon'), and ( ) 'noon' (literally 'middle-day'). * verb–object compounds, as in ( ) 'master of the household' (literally 'manage-horse'), and ( ) 'scribe' (literally 'make-writing'). However the components of compounds were not
bound morpheme In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression, while a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound f ...
s: they could still be used separately. Compounding became more productive during the following Han period and has continued to the present day. A number of bimorphemic syllables appeared in the Classical period, resulting from the fusion of words with following unstressed particles or pronouns. Thus the negatives and are viewed as fusions of the negators and respectively with a third-person pronoun .


Notes


References


Citations


Works cited

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Further reading

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External links

* (review of ) * (review of ) * (review of )
Recent Advances in Old Chinese Historical Phonology
at SOAS, University of London, November 2015 {{Authority control Subject–verb–object languages Languages attested from the 13th century BC