History of the Chinese language

The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), with the very oldest dated to c. 1250 BCE.

Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Sinitic (before 1300 BCE)

Main article: Proto-Sino-Tibetan language

"Proto-Sinitic" redirects here; not to be confused with Proto-Sinaitic.

480km
298miles

Origin of Proto-Sino-Tibetan

   

A hypothetical scenario for the homeland and spread of Proto-Sino-Tibetan speakers, based on a 2019 database of comparative archaeological data developed by Laurent Sagart et al.

The oldest attested written Chinese—comprising the oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE by the Shang dynasty royal house in modern Anyang, Henan—is also the earliest direct evidence of the Sinitic languages. Most experts agree that Sinitic languages share a common ancestor with the Tibeto-Burman languages, forming the primary Sino-Tibetan family. However, the precise placement of Sinitic within Sino-Tibetan is a matter of debate. Reconstructing the common ancestor of all Sino-Tibetan languages, known as Proto-Sino-Tibetan—a language last spoken thousands of years before the historical record—has been challenging. Even though Chinese characters are logographs 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. There are several reasons that the comparative method conventionally used in historical linguistics has had limited success in reconstructing the history of Sino-Tibetan compared to the results achieved with other major language families like Indo-European:

1. Relatively few Sino-Tibetan languages, of which Chinese is one, have written traditions old enough to provide useful comparative evidence.
2. In areas where Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken, there have historically been high rates of population transfer. This has resulted in many areal features shared between languages, making it difficult to determine which relationships—not only cognates in vocabulary, but also grammatical features—are phylogenetic.
3. Languages that make heavier use of morphology generally provide more data useful in historical comparisons, i.e. the conjugated and derived forms of words. Compared to Indo-European languages like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, Sino-Tibetan languages are highly isolating and exhibit very little morphology, making it difficult to identify cognates.

Pre-Classical period (1300–500 BCE)

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 and oracle bones during the Shang dynasty (1766–1122 BCE). During the first half of the Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE), writing descended from the Shang is found in texts including inscriptions on bronze artefacts, the Classic of Poetry, the history of the Book of Documents, and portions of the I 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. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. 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 with Qing dynasty philologists.

Classical period (500 BCE – 1 CE)

Words in Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic; as such, each character denoted an independent word. 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 systematic sound changes caused by the affixes. For example, many modern readings reflect the departing tone present in Middle Chinese, which many scholars now believe is a reflex of a derivational suffix /*-s/ that served a range of semantic functions in Old Chinese. This is possibly the only example of inflectional morphology extant in what was otherwise an analytic language:

Evolution of character senses as caused by the Old Chinese 去聲 (qùshēng)

Character	OC		MC		mod.	Gloss
傳	*drjon	→	drjwen'	→	chuánⓘ	'to transmit'
	*drjons	→	drjwenH	→	zhuànⓘ	'a record'
磨	*maj	→	ma	→	móⓘ	'to grind'
	*majs	→	maH	→	mòⓘ	'grindstone'
宿	*sjuk	→	sjuwk	→	sùⓘ	'to stay overnight'
	*sjuks	→	sjuwH	→	xiùⓘ	'celestial mansion'
説	*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 Chinese de-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.

Evolution of character transitivity pairs from Old Chinese

Character	OC		MC		mod.	Gloss
見	*kens	→	kenH	→	jiànⓘ	'to see'
	*gens	→	henH	→	xiànⓘ	'to appear'
敗	*prats	→	pæjH	→	bàiⓘ	'to defeat'
	*brats	→	bæjH	→		'to be defeated'
折	*tjat	→	tsyet	→	zhéⓘ	'to bend'
	*djat	→	dzyet	→	shéⓘ	'to be broken by bending'

A divergent dialect split from Old Chinese in this period: Ba–Shu Chinese was first described during the Western Han dynasty and represented one of the earliest splits from Old Chinese.

Eastern Han period (1–300 CE)

Main article: Eastern Han Chinese

Eastern Han Chinese is the period which is considered to be intermediate between Old and Middle Chinese. Modern Min Chinese dialects are believed to have descended from southeastern dialects of Eastern Han Chinese which split off during this period.

The consonant clusters postulated for Old Chinese had generally disappeared by the Eastern Han period.

The customary writing style of the period was strongly modelled on the classics, and thus provides only occasional glimpses of contemporary grammar. Some works contain passages in a more colloquial style thought to reflect contemporary speech. Many such examples are found in translated Buddhist literature, particularly direct speech, or paraphrases and commentaries of the classics written for the benefit of novice students. In comparison with Warring States texts, colloquial Eastern Han texts display a massive increase in compound content words. Monosyllabic words were largely replaced by disyllabic compounds.

Old Chinese had a range of personal pronouns, including case distinctions. In the Eastern Han, these were reduced to first person wǒ 我 and second person rǔ 汝. The demonstrative shì 是 also came to be used as a copular verb in sentences of the form A 是 B (as in modern Chinese), replacing the typical classical pattern A B 也 (yě). They also make much less use of function words in favour of periphrasis.

Middle Chinese (300–1200)

Main article: Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese was a form of Chinese used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties between the 4th and 10th centuries. It can be divided into two periods: Early Middle Chinese is documented in the Qieyun (601), the first rime dictionary, and a later revision in the Guangyun (1008). Late Middle Chinese is reflected by 12th century rime tables such as the Yunjing. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rime dictionaries, foreign transliterations, rime tables constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words.

Main article: Four tones (Middle Chinese)

Middle Chinese tones developed from Old Chinese syllables with final consonants which disappeared, with "departing" tone developing from syllables that ended with /s/, "rising" tone developing from syllables that ended in /ʔ/, the "entering" tone being syllables who retained a final stop consonant, and "level" tone from syllables that ended in a vowel. As these suffixes were part of the derivational morphology of Old Chinese, tonal variation often appeared either in a single word or in semantically related words.

The Tang dynasty form of Middle Chinese was highly influential, forming much of the reading pronunciations in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, and displacing pre-Tang regional varieties across all of its territories except for individual words or colloquial Min Chinese.

Old Mandarin (1100–1400)

Main article: Old Mandarin

After the Middle Chinese period, non-Han rule in Northern China weakened the conservative tradition of the Qieyun. Local speech patterns in the North developed a new form of spoken language which scholars now refer to as Old Mandarin.

Late Imperial Mandarin (1400–1850)

Main article: Mandarin (late imperial lingua franca)

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. Moreover, Mandarin, called Guanhua ('officials' speech') was at first based on the Nanjing dialect, and became the dominant vernacular in northern China during the early Qing. It was gradually challenged by the variety used by scholar-officials of Beijing. In the 17th century, the Qing began setting up orthoepy academies to conform pronunciation to the Beijing standard, but had little success.

Modern Chinese (1850–present)

Main article: History of Standard Chinese

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.

This situation changed with the creation of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Standard Chinese in both mainland China and Taiwan, but not Hong Kong or Macau. At the time that it was being widely introduced in these places, the British colony of Hong Kong did not use it at all. In Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and parts of Guangxi, 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 the sinification of foreign words.

After the establishment of the Kuomintang (KMT), the 1913 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation planned to use Guanhua as the basis of a national dialect, redubbing it as Guoyu ('national language'). Continuing previous policies, the People's Republic of China sought to further standardize a common language, now dubbed Standard 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's traditional characters to a simplified writing system to improve literacy.

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.

See also

• Historical Chinese phonology

References

Works cited

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