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The earliesthistorical linguistic evidence of the spokenChinese language dates back approximately 4500 years,[1] while examples of the writing system that would becomewritten Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels andoracle bones during theLate Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE),[2][3] with the very oldest dated toc. 1200 BCE.[4]
The oldest attestedwritten Chinese—comprising theoracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE by theShang dynasty royal house in modernAnyang, Henan—is also the earliest direct evidence of theSinitic languages. Most experts agree that Sinitic languages share a common ancestor with theTibeto-Burman languages, forming the primarySino-Tibetan family. However, the precise placement of Sinitic within Sino-Tibetan is a matter of debate.[6] Reconstructing the common ancestor of all Sino-Tibetan languages, known asProto-Sino-Tibetan—a language last spoken thousands of years before the historical record—has been challenging. Even thoughChinese characters arelogographs that do not encode the sounds of speech directly, written Chinese allows for the partial reconstruction of how ancient forms of the language sounded. No such evidence exists for earlier stages, including where Sinitic would have split from other branches of Sino-Tibetan.[7] There are several reasons that thecomparative method conventionally used inhistorical linguistics has had limited success in reconstructing the history of Sino-Tibetan compared to the results achieved with other major language families likeIndo-European:[8]
Old Chinese, sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", is ancestral to all current Chinese languages. The first known use of the Chinese writing system is divinatory inscriptions into tortoise shells andoracle bones during theShang dynasty (1766–1122 BCE). During the first half of theZhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE), writing descended from the Shang is found in texts including inscriptions on bronze artefacts, theClassic of Poetry, the history of theBook of Documents, and portions of theI Ching. Phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations, as do the pronunciations of borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.[citation needed] Old Chinese was not whollyuninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but was probably still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started withQing dynasty philologists.[citation needed]
Words in Old Chinese were generallymonosyllabic; as such, each character denoted an independent word.[9]Affixes could be added to form a new word, which was often written with the same single character. In many cases, the pronunciations then diverged due to the systematicsound changes caused by the affixes. For example, many modern readings reflect thedeparting tone present inMiddle Chinese, which many scholars now believe is areflex of aderivational suffix/*-s/ that served a range of semantic functions in Old Chinese. This is possibly the only example ofinflectional morphology extant in what was otherwise ananalytic language:[10][11]
| Character | OC[α] | MC[β] | mod. | Gloss | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 傳[12] | *drjon | → | drjwen' | → | chuánⓘ | 'to transmit' |
| *drjons | → | drjwenH | → | zhuànⓘ | 'a record' | |
| 磨[12] | *maj | → | ma | → | móⓘ | 'to grind' |
| *majs | → | maH | → | mòⓘ | 'grindstone' | |
| 宿[13] | *sjuk | → | sjuwk | → | sùⓘ | 'to stay overnight' |
| *sjuks | → | sjuwH | → | xiùⓘ | 'celestial mansion' | |
| 説[14] | *hljot | → | sywet | → | shuōⓘ | 'speak' |
| *hljots | → | sywejH | → | shuìⓘ | 'exhort' |
Another common sound change occurred between voiced and voiceless initials, though the phonemic voicing distinction has disappeared in most modern varieties. This is believed to reflect an Old Chinesede-transitivising prefix, but scholars disagree on whether the voiced or voiceless form reflects the original root. Each pair of examples below reflects two words of opposite transitivity.[citation needed]
| Character | OC[α] | MC[β] | mod. | Gloss | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 見[15] | *kens | → | kenH | → | jiànⓘ | 'to see' |
| *gens | → | henH | → | xiànⓘ | 'to appear' | |
| 敗[15] | *prats | → | pæjH | → | bàiⓘ[a] | 'to defeat' |
| *brats | → | bæjH | → | 'to be defeated' | ||
| 折[16] | *tjat | → | tsyet | → | zhéⓘ | 'to bend' |
| *djat | → | dzyet | → | shéⓘ | 'to be broken by bending' |
Middle Chinese was a form of Chinese used during theSui,Tang, andSong dynasties between the 4th and 10th centuries. It can be divided into two periods: Early Middle Chinese is documented in theQieyun (601), the firstrime dictionary, and a later revision in theGuangyun (1008). Late Middle Chinese is reflected byrime tables such as theYunjing. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rime dictionaries, foreigntransliterations, rime tables constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words.
The development of Chinese has been complex. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is due in part to the open plains of northern China, in contrast to the mountains and rivers of southern China that enabled greater linguistic diversity.[citation needed] Moreover, Mandarin, calledGuanhua ('officials' speech') was at first based on theNanjing dialect, and became the dominant vernacular in northern China during the early Qing. It was gradually challenged by the variety used byscholar-officials of Beijing. In the 17th century, the Qing began setting uporthoepy academies to conform pronunciation to the Beijing standard, but had little success.[citation needed]
During the late 19th century, the Beijing dialect finally replaced the Nanjing dialect in the imperial court. For the general population, although varieties of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. Non-Mandarin speakers in southern China continued to use their local varieties in most aspects of life. The area where the new Beijing court dialect was used was thus fairly limited.[citation needed]
This situation changed with the creation of an elementary school education system committed to teachingStandard Chinese in bothmainland China and Taiwan, but notHong Kong orMacau. At the time that it was being widely introduced in these places, theBritish colony of Hong Kong did not use it at all. In Hong Kong, Macau,Guangdong and parts ofGuangxi,Cantonese remains the everyday language used in business and education. The Chinese language has adopted a wide array of foreign words, which have been adapted to Chinese dialects and pronunciation, referred to as thesinification of foreign words.[citation needed]
After the establishment of theKuomintang (KMT), the 1913Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation planned to useGuanhua as the basis of a national dialect, redubbing it asGuoyu ('national language').[17] Continuing previous policies, the People's Republic of China sought to further standardize a common language, now dubbedStandard Chinese, for national and political unity. The "Decision of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and State Council Concerning Elimination of Illiteracy" of March 1956 solidified the Communist Party's plans to reform the country'straditional characters to asimplified writing system to improveliteracy.[18]
Besides the standard writing systems promoted by the government, no other written form of Chinese has seen widespread use to an extent comparable to that of Standard Chinese.[19]
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