文言文入門
Premodern Chinese Written
Language
An Introduction
Lecturer: Ingo Schäfer
I
詞類簡稱表
Abbreviations
<名> 名詞
<代> 代詞
<形> 形容詞
<動> 動詞
<數> 數詞
<量> 量詞
<副> 副詞
<介> 介詞
<連> 連詞
<助> 助詞
<嘆> 嘆詞
<象聲>象聲詞
<頭> 詞頭
<尾> 詞尾
míngcí
dàicí
xíngróngcí
dòngcí
shùcí
liàngcí
fùcí
jiècí
liáncí
zhùcí
tàncí
xiàngshēngcí
cítóu
cíwěi
noun—n.
pronoun—pron.
adjective—adj. > stative verb
verb-v.
numeral—num.
measure word— meas.
adverb—adv．
preposition—prep. > co verb
conjunction—conj.
particle—part. > marker
interjection—int.
onomatopoeia—onom.
prefix—prf.
suffix—suf.
<動態助詞>
<結構助詞>
<語氣>
dòngtàizhùcí
jiégòuzhùcí
yǔqì
aspect particle—asp.
structual particle—struct.
modal particle—mod.
系動詞
copula
The short grammatical explanations given in each lesson are based on the Online
version of Gregory Chiang, Language of the Dragon. A Classical Chinese Reader,
vol. I, Boston, MA: Cheng & Tsui Company, 1998:
http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/360/Etext/
II
History of the Chinese language
Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language
family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, analogous
to Proto-Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended.
The relations between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are an area of active
research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort
is that, while there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient
sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the division between proto-SinoTibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of the languages that would allow us to reconstruct
Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood.
Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first
systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The
system was much revised, but always heavily relying on Karlgren's insights and methods.
Old Chinese (上古漢語), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese," was the language common
during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC), texts of which include
inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and
portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese
characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the
borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable
insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which
aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without
tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists.
Middle Chinese (中古漢語) was the language used during the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties
(7th through 10th centuries AD). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻
"Qièyùn" rime dictionary (601 AD), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣
韻 "Guǎngyùn" rime dictionary. Linguists are confident of having reconstructed how Middle
Chinese sounded. 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. However, all reconstructions are tentative; for
example, scholars have shown that trying to reconstruct modern Cantonese from the rimes of
modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of the language.
The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present
has been complex. Most northern Chinese people, in Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the
northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yúnnán), use various Mandarin dialects as their
home language.
Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of
Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese
dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking
Qīng Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy academies (正音書院 S:
正音书院) to make pronunciation conform to the Qīng capital Běijīng's standard, but had
little success. During the Qīng's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Běijīng Mandarin
finally replaced Nánjīng Mandarin in the imperial court. For the general population, although
variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of
III
Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use
their various regionalects for every aspect of life. The new Běijīng Mandarin court standard
was thus fairly limited.
This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong
Kong) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Standard Mandarin.
In Hong Kong, the language of education, formal speech, and daily life remains the local
Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_language
IV
Table 1:
Periodization of Chinese Phonology
BERNHARD KARLGREN
EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK
PROTO-CHINESE:
The oldest stage of the Chinese
language reconstructible in some form -the period preceding the earliest literary
documents
(No explicit positing of a Proto-Chinese
stage per se.)
ARCHAIC CHINESE:
OLD CHINESE:
The language of the Henan region
during the first Zhou centuries (from
1028 BC), as revealed partly by the
rhymes in the Shijing 詩 經 and other
early texts, and partly by xiesheng 諧聲
1characters.
The language of ca. 600 BC, based on the
Shijing and other sources
ANCIENT CHINESE:
EARLY MIDDLE CHINESE:
The language of around 600 AD
codified in the Qieyun 切 韻 rhyme
dictionary, treated as reflecting the
Chang'an dialect of (what is today)
Shaanxi province, under the Sui dynasty
(581 - 618 AD).
The standard language of the Northern and
Southern Dynasties codified in the Qieyun
(601 AD), treated as reflecting the speech of
the Nanjing court in the 6th c. (i.e., based on
3rd c. Luoyang speech brought to the
Nanjing court).
LATE MIDDLE CHINESE*:
The standard language of late Tang
Chang'an speech, codified in the Yunjing 韻
鏡 (1161 preface).
MIDDLE CHINESE:
The language of the Song dynasty
rhyme tables, such as the Qieyun
Zhizhangtu 切 韻 指 掌 圖 (wrongly
attributed to Sima Guang, 1067 AD,
now considered a work composed
between 1176 and 1203, hence later
than the Yunjing).**
1
***
形聲
V
OLD MANDARIN:
EARLY MANDARIN:
The language of Ming dynasty Nanjing
speech, as reflected in the dictionary,
Hongwu Zhengyun 洪武正韻 (1375
AD).
The language of the Yuan dynasty based on
Beijing, codified in the Menggu Ziyun 蒙古
字韻 (using the hP'ags-pa alphabet)2 and the
Zhongyuan Yinyun 中 原 音 韻 (1324 AD)
rhyme book.
Copyright © 1996-2000 Marjorie K.M. Chan.
(additions by I.S.)
* Baxter (1992: 14-15) also divides Middle Chinese into Early and Late Middle Chinese,
with Late Middle Chinese representing the language of late Tang. Ting (1992) does likewise,
with Late Middle Chinese representing middle and later Tang dynasty (ca. 700 - 900).
** On the assumption that the Qieyun Zhizhangtu was the earliest extant rhyme table,
Karlgren treated it as representing Middle Chinese and used it to interpret the Qieyun.
*** Ting (1992) has a 'Medievel Chinese period, subdivided into three subperiods:
1. Early Medieval Chinese, representing Five Dynasties and Northern Song (ca. 900 - 1150)
2. Middle Medieval Chinese, representing Southern Song and Yuan dynasties (ca. 1150 - 1400)
3. Late Medieval Chinese, representing Ming dynasty (ca. 1400 - 1650)
REFERENCES:
Baxter, William H. 1992. A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.)
Ting, Pang-hsin. 1992. "Hanyu fangyan-shi he fangyan-quyu-shi-de yanjiu." In: IHP Publication Committee
(ed.). Chinese Languages and Linguistics I: Chinese Dialects. (=Symposium Series of the Institute of History
and Philology, Academia Sinica, Number 2). Taipei, Taiwan. Pp. 23-39.
http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/chan9/c681/table1.htm

Termini used in our course
Archaic Chinese (Proto-Chinese) 遠 古 漢 語
Old Chinese 古 漢 語
Middle Chinese 中 古 漢 語
Mandarin 官 話
2
From 1269 to 1368, at the order of Khubilai Khan, the square of hP’ags-pa script, created on the basis of Tibetan and
Indian letters. served as the official alphabet of the Yuan Dinasty. The materials in this script are a good reflection of the
phonetic system of the Mongolian language of that time. The square script was adopted not only for transliterating foreign
loan words, but also for recording entire texts in Chinese, Tibetan. Sanskrit and Turkish. In view of this, the prominent
Mongolist B.Ya. Vladimirtsov. observed that ‘the hP’ags-pa script was the Mongolian international alphabet of the thirteenth
century’.
VI
History of Chinese Characters
According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat
under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount
Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by
the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the
landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zi -Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the
devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of civilization, for
good and for bad.
Modern archaeological evidence suggests that the characters are more ancient still. The
earliest evidence for what might be writing comes from Jiahu, a Neolithic site in the basin of
the Yellow River in Henan province, dated to c. 6500 BC [2]. It has yielded turtle carapaces
that were pitted and inscribed with symbols. Later excavations in eastern China's Anhui
province and the Dadiwan culture sites in the eastern part of northwestern China's Gansu
province uncovered pottery shards, dated to c. 5000 BC, inscribed with symbols [3][4]. It is
unknown whether these symbols formed part of an organized system of writing, but many of
them bear resemblance to what are accepted as early Chinese characters, and it is speculated
that they may be ancestors to the latter.
Inscription-bearing artifacts from the Dawenkou culture culture site in Juxian County,
Shandong, dating to c. 2800 BC, have also been found [5]. The Chengziyai site in Longshan
township, Shandong has produced fragments of inscribed bones used to divine the future,
dating to 2500 - 1900 BC, and symbols on pottery vessels from Dinggong are thought by
some scholars to be an early form of writing. Symbols of a similar nature have also been
found on pottery shards from the Liangzhu culture (良渚) of the lower Yangtze valley.
Although the earliest forms of primitive Chinese writing are no more than individual symbols
and therefore cannot be considered a true written script, the inscriptions found on bones
(dated to 2500 - 1900 BC) used for the purposes of divination from the late Neolithic
Longshan (龍山) Culture (c. 3200 - 1900 BC) are thought by some to be a proto-written
script, similar to the earliest forms of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It is possible that
these inscriptions are ancestral to the later Oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty and
therefore the modern Chinese script, since late Neolithic culture found in Longshan is widely
accepted by historians and archaeologists to be ancestral to the bronze age Erlitou culture and
the later Shang and Zhou Dynasties.
The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the Oracle bone script (jiǎgǔ
wén, lit. shell-bone-script), a well-developed writing system of the Shang Dynasty (or Yin
Dynasty), attested from about 1600 BC (from Zhengzhou) and 1300 BC (from Anyang),
along with a very few logographs found on pottery shards and cast in bronzes, known as the
Bronze script ("jīnwén"), which is very similar to but more complex and pictorial than the
Oracle Bone Script. Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known Oracle Bone logographs can be
identified with later Chinese characters and therefore easily read. However, it should be noted
that these 1,400 logographs include most of the commonly used ones.
VII
Written Styles
There are numerous styles, or scripts, in which Chinese characters can be written, deriving
from various calligraphic and historical models. Most of these originated in China and are
now common, with minor variations, in all countries where Chinese characters are used.
The Oracle Bone and Bronzeware scripts being no longer used, the oldest script that is still in
use today is the Seal Script (篆書 zhuànshū). It evolved organically out of the Zhou bronze
script, and was adopted in a standardized form under the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi
Huang. The seal script, as the name suggests, is now only used in artistic seals. Few people
are still able to read it effortlessly today, although the art of carving a traditional seal in the
script remains alive; some calligraphers also work in this style.
Scripts that are still used regularly are the "Clerical Script" (隸書 lìshū) of the Qin Dynasty to
the Han Dynasty, the Weibei (魏碑 wèibēi), the "Regular Script" (楷書 kǎishū) used for most
printing, and the "Semi-cursive Script" (行書 xíngshū) used for most handwriting.
The Cursive Script (草書 cǎoshū) is not in general use, and is a purely artistic calligraphic
style. The basic character shapes are suggested, rather than explicitly realized, and the
abbreviations are extreme. Despite being cursive to the point where individual strokes are no
longer differentiable and the characters often illegible to the untrained eye, this script (also
known as draft) is highly revered for the beauty and freedom that it embodies. Some of the
Simplified Chinese characters adopted by the People's Republic of China, and some of the
simplified characters used in Japan, are derived from the Cursive Script. The Japanese
hiragana script is also derived from this script.
There also exist scripts created outside China, such as the Japanese Edomoji styles; these have
tended to remain restricted to their countries of origin, rather than spreading to other countries
like the standard scripts described above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_script
Table 2:
Graphic development of Chinese characters
Period
Script
Pinyin
English
13th–11th centuries BC
jiaguwen oracle-bone script
13th–4th centuries BC
jinwen
8th–3rd centuries BC
zhuanshu seal script
2nd century AD
lishu
clerical script
caoshu
cursive script
xingshu
running script
kaishu
standard script
since 4th century AD
bronze script
VIII
'fish'
'woman'
IX
六書
Formation of Characters
The early stages of the development of Chinese characters were dominated by pictograms, in
which meaning was expressed directly by the shapes. The development of the script, both to
cover words for abstract concepts and to increase the efficiency of writing, has led to the
introduction of numerous non-pictographic characters.
The various types of character were first classified c. 100 CE by the Chinese linguist Xu
Shen, whose etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字) divides the script into six
categories, the liùshū' ( 六 書 ). While the categories and classification are occasionally
problematic and arguably fail to reflect the complete nature of the Chinese writing system, the
system has been perpetuated by its long history and pervasive use.[6]
Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters
1. Pictograms (象形字 xiàngxíngzì)
Contrary to popular belief, pictograms make up only a small portion of Chinese characters.
While characters in this class derive from pictures, they have been standardized, simplified,
and stylised to make them easier to write, and their derivation is therefore not always obvious.
Examples include 日 (rì) for "sun", 月 (yuè) for "moon", and 木 (mù) for "tree".
There is no concrete number for the proportion of modern characters that are pictographic in
nature; however, Xu Shen (c. 100 CE) estimated that 4% of characters fell into this category.
2. Pictophonetic compounds (形聲字 Xíngshēngzì)[1][2]
Also called semantic-phonetic compounds, or phono-semantic compounds, this category
represents the largest group of characters in modern Chinese. Characters of this sort are
X
composed of two parts: a pictograph, which suggests the general meaning of the character,
and a phonetic part, which is derived from a character pronounced in the same way as the
word the new character represents.
Examples are 河 (hé) river, 湖 (hú) lake, 流 (liú) stream, 沖 (chōng) riptide, 滑 (huá)
slippery. All these characters have on the left a radical of three dots, which is a simplified
pictograph for a water drop, indicating that the character has a semantic connection with
water; the right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of 沖
(chōng), the phonetic indicator is 中 (zhōng), which by itself means middle. In this case it can
be seen that the pronunciation of the character has diverged from that of its phonetic indicator;
this process means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary
today. Further, the choice of radicals may also seem arbitrary in some cases; for example, the
radical of 貓 (māo) cat is 豸 (zhì), originally a pictograph for worms, but in characters of this
sort indicating an animal of any sort.
Xu Shen (c. 100 CE) placed approximately 82% of characters into this category, while in the
Kangxi Dictionary (1716 CE) the number is closer to 90%, due to the extremely productive
use of this technique to extend the Chinese vocabulary.
3. Ideograph (指事字 zhǐshìzì)
Also called a simple indicative, simple ideograph, or ideogram, characters of this sort either
add indicators to pictographs to make new meanings, or illustrate abstract concepts directly.
For instance, while 刀 (dāo) is a pictogram for "knife", placing an indicator in the knife
makes 刃 (rèn), an ideogram for "blade". Other common examples are 上 (shàng) for "up"
and 下 (xià) for "down". This category is small, as most concepts can be represented by
characters in other categories.
4. Logical aggregrates (會意字 Huìyìzì)
Also translated as associative compounds, characters of this sort combine pictograms to
symbolize an abstract concept. For instance, 木 (mu) is a pictogram of a tree, and putting two
木 together makes 林 (lin), meaning forest. Combining 日 (rì) sun and 月 (yuè) moon makes
明 (míng) bright, which is traditionally interpreted as symbolizing the combination of sun and
moon as the natural sources of light.
Xu Shen estimated that 13% of characters fall into this category.
5. Associate Transformation (轉注字 Zhuǎnzhùzì)
Characters in this category originally represented the same meaning but have bifurcated
through orthographic and often semantic drift. For instance, 考 (kǎo) to verify and 老 (lǎo) old
were once the same character, meaning "elderly person", but detached into two separate
words. Characters of this category are rare, so in modern systems this group is often omitted
or combined with others.
6. Borrowing (假借字 Jiǎjièzì)
XI
Also called phonetic loan characters, this category covers cases where an existing character is
used to represent an unrelated word with similar pronunciation; sometimes the old meaning is
then lost completely, as with characters such as 自 (zì), which has lost its original meaning of
nose completely and exclusively means oneself, or 萬 (wan), which originally meant spider
but is now used only in the sense of ten thousand.
This technique has become uncommon, since there is considerable resistance to changing the
meaning of existing characters. However, it has been used in the development of written
forms of dialects, notably Cantonese and Taiwanese in Hong Kong and Taiwan, due to the
amount of dialectal vocabulary which historically has had no written form and thus lacks
characters of its own.
XII
Simplification in China
The use of traditional characters versus simplified characters varies greatly, and can depend
on both the local customs and the medium. Because character simplifications were not
officially sanctioned and generally a result of caoshu writing or idiosyncratic reductions,
traditional, standard characters were mandatory in printed works, while the (unofficial)
simplified characters would be used in everyday writing, or quick scribblings. Since the
1950s, and especially with the publication of the 1964 list, the PRC has officially adopted a
simplified script, while Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan retain the use of the traditional
characters. There is no absolute rule for using either system, and often it is determined by
what the target audience understands, as well as the upbringing of the writer. In addition there
is a special system of characters used for writing numerals in financial contexts; these
characters are modifications or adaptations of the original, simple numerals, deliberately made
complicated to prevent forgeries or unauthorized alterations.
Although most often associated with the PRC, character simplification predates the 1949
communist victory. Caoshu, cursive written text, almost always includes character
simplification, and simplified forms have always existed in print, albeit not for the most
formal works. In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place
within the Kuomintang government, and a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers
have long maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China. Indeed,
this desire by the Kuomintang to simplify the Chinese writing system (inherited and
implemented by the CCP) also nursed aspirations of some for the adoption of a phonetic
script, in imitation of the Roman alphabet, and spawned such inventions as the Gwoyeu
Romatzyh.
The PRC issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first
in 1956 and the second in 1964. A second round of character simplifications (known as erjian,
or "second round simplified characters") was promulgated in 1977. It was poorly received,
and in 1986 the authorities rescinded the second round completely, while making six revisions
to the 1964 list, including the restoration of three traditional characters that had been
simplified: 叠 dié, 覆 fù, 像 xiàng.
Many of the simplifications adopted had been in use in informal contexts for a long time, as
more convenient alternatives to their more complex standard forms. For example, the
traditional character 來 lái (come) was written with the structure 来 in the clerical script (隸書
lìshū) of the Han dynasty. This clerical form uses two fewer strokes, and was thus adopted as
a simplified form. The character 雲 yún (cloud) was written with the structure 云 in the oracle
bone script of the Shāng dynasty, and had remained in use later as a phonetic loan in the
meaning of to say. The simplified form reverted to this original structure.
Southeast Asian Chinese communities
Singapore underwent three successive rounds of character simplification. These resulted in
some simplifications that differed from those used in mainland China. It ultimately adopted
the reforms of the PRC in their entirety as official, and has implemented them in the
educational system.
Malaysia promulgated a set of simplified characters in 1981, which were also completely
identical to the Mainland China simplifications; here, however, the simplifications were not
XIII
generally widely adopted, as the Chinese educational system fell outside the purview of the
federal government. However, with the advent of the PRC as an economic powerhouse,
simplified characters are taught at school, and the simplified characters are more commonly,
if not almost universally, used. However, a large majority of the older Chinese literate
generation use the traditional characters. Chinese newspapers are published in either set of
characters, with some even incorporating special Cantonese characters when publishing about
the canto celebrity scene of Hong Kong.
Japanese Kanji
In the years after World War II, the Japanese government also instituted a series of
orthographic reforms. Some characters were given simplified forms called Shinjitai 新字体
(lit. "new character forms"; the older forms were then labelled the Kyūjitai 旧字体 , lit. "old
character forms"). The number of characters in common use was restricted, and formal lists of
characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, first the 1850-character
Tōyō kanji 当用漢字 list in 1945, and later the 1945-character Jōyō kanji 常用漢字 list in
1981. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were
officially discouraged. This was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and
simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. These are simply guidelines, hence many
characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, especially
those used for personal and place names (for the former, see Jinmeiyō kanji).
Comparisons of Traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters, and Simplified
Japanese characters 1
Chinese
simp.
Traditional
Simplified in Chinese, not
Japanese
Simplified in Japanese, not
Chinese
Japanese
simp.
meaning
電
电
電
electricity
開
开
開
open
東
东
東
east
佛
佛
仏
Buddha
惠
惠
恵
favour
拜
拜
拝
kowtow, pray to,
worship
XIV
Simplified in both, but
differently
Simplified in both in the
same way
圖
图
図
picture, diagram
轉
转
転
turn
廣
广
広
wide, broad
學
学
学
learn
體
体
体
body
點
点
点
dot, point
Note: this table is merely a brief sample, not a complete listing.
XV
Number of Chinese characters
What is the total number of Chinese characters from past to present? The answer remains
unknowable because new ones are developed all the time; characters are theoretically an open
set. The number of entries in major Chinese dictionaries is the best means of estimating the
historical growth of character inventory.
Number of characters in Chinese dictionaries[3]
Date Name of dictionary Number of characters
100 Shuowen Jiezi
9,353
543? Yupian
12,158
601 Qieyun
16,917
1011Guangyun
26,194
1039Jiyun
53,525
1615Zihui
33,179
1716Kangxi Zidian
47,035
1916Zhonghua Da Zidian48,000
1989Hanyu Da Zidian
54,000
Comparing the Shuowen Jiezi and Hanyu Da Zidian reveals that the overall number of
characters has increased 577 percent over 1,900 years. Depending upon how one counts
variants, 50,000+ is good approximation for the current total number. This correlates with
thee most comprehensive Japanese and Korean dictionaries of Chinese characters; the Dai
Kan-Wa Jiten has some 50,000 entries, and the Han-Han Dae Sajeon has over 57,000. One
recent dictionary, the 1994 Zhonghua Zihai, advertises as many as 85,000 characters, but that
remains unverified.
Modified radicals and obsolete variants are two common reasons for the ever-increasing
number of characters. Creating a new character by modifying the radical is an easy way to
disambiguate homographs among xíngshēngzì pictophonetic compounds. This practice began
long before the standardization of Chinese script by Qin Shi Huang and continues to the
present day. The traditional 3rd-person pronoun tā (他 "he; she; it"), which is written with the
"person radical," illustrates modifying significs to form new characters. In modern usage,
there is a graphic distinction between tā (她 "she") with the "woman radical" and tā (牠/它
"it") with the "animal/roof radical". One consequence of modifying radicals is the
fossilization of rare and obscure variant logographs, some of which are not even used in
Classical Chinese. For instance, he 和 "harmony; peace", which combines the "grain radical"
with the "mouth radical", has infrequent variants 咊 with the radicals reversed and 龢 with the
"flute radical".
XVI
Chinese
It is usually said that about 3,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese (for
example, to read a Chinese newspaper), and a well-educated person will know well in excess
of 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Note that it is not necessary to know a character for every known
word of Chinese, as the majority of modern Chinese words, unlike their Ancient Chinese and
Middle Chinese counterparts, are bimorphemic compounds, that is, they are made up of two,
usually common, characters.
In the People's Republic of China, which uses Simplified Chinese, the Xiàndài Hàny ǔ
Chángyòng Zìbiǎo (现代汉语常用字表; Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese)
lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters, while the Xiàndài
Hàny ǔ T ō ngyòng Zìbi ǎ o (现代汉语通用字表; Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of
Modern Chinese) lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above.
GB2312, an early version of the national encoding standard used in the People's Republic of
China, has 6,763 code points. GB18030, the modern, mandatory standard, has a much higher
number. The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi proficiency test covers approximately 5,000 characters.
In the Republic of China (Taiwan), which uses Traditional Chinese, the Ministry of
Education's Chángyòng Guózì Biāojǔn Zìtǐ Biǎo (常用國字標準字體表; Chart of Standard
Forms of Common National Characters) lists 4,808 characters; the Cì Chángyòng Guózì Biāoj
ǔn Zìt ǐ Bi ǎo (次常用國字標準字體表; Chart of Standard Forms of Less-Than-Common
National Characters) lists another 6,341 characters. The Chinese Standard Interchange Code
(CNS11643)—the official national encoding standard—supports 48,027 characters, while the
most widely-used encoding scheme, BIG-5, supports only 13,053.
In Hong Kong, which uses Traditional Chinese, the Education and Manpower Bureau's
Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu (常用字字形表), intended for use in elementary and junior secondary
education, lists a total of 4,759 characters.
In addition, there is a large corpus of dialect characters, which are not used in formal written
Chinese but represent colloquial terms in non-Mandarin Chinese spoken forms. One such
variety is Written Cantonese, in widespread use in Hong Kong even for certain formal
documents, due to the former British colonial administration's recognition of Cantonese for
use for official purposes. In Taiwan, there is also an informal body of characters used to
represent the spoken Min Nan dialect.
Japanese
In Japanese there are 1945 Jōyō kanji (常用漢字 lit. "frequently used kanji") designated by
the Japanese Ministry of Education; these are taught during primary and secondary school.
The list is a recommendation, not a restriction, and many characters missing from it are still in
common use.
The one area where character usage is officially restricted is in names, which may contain
only government-approved characters. Since the Jōyō kanji list excludes many characters
which have been used in personal and place names for generations, an additional list, referred
to as the Jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字 lit. "kanji for use in personal names"), is published. It
currently contains 983 characters, bringing the total number of government-endorsed
characters to 2928. (See also the Names section of the Kanji article.)
XVII
Today, a well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3500 kanji. The Kanji kentei (
日本漢字能力検定試験 Nihon Kanji Nōryoku Kentei Shiken or Test of Japanese Kanji
Aptitude) tests a speaker's ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the Kanji kentei
tests on 6000 kanji, though in practice few people attain or need this level.
Korean
In Korea, 한자 Hanja have become a politically contentious issue, with some Koreans
urging a "purification" of the national language and culture by totally abandoning their use.
These individuals encourage the exclusive use of the native Hangul alphabet throughout
Korean society and the end to character education in public schools.
In South Korea, educational policy on characters has swung back and forth, often swayed by
education ministers' personal opinions. At times, middle and high school students have been
formally exposed to 1,800 to 2,000 basic characters, albeit with the principal focus on
recognition, with the aim of achieving newspaper-literacy. Since there is little need to use
Hanja in everyday life, young adult Koreans are often unable to read more than a few hundred
characters.
There is a clear trend toward the exclusive use of Hangul in day-to-day South Korean society.
Hanja are still used to some extent, particularly in newspapers, weddings, place names and
calligraphy. Hanja is also extensively used in situations where ambiguity must be avoided,
such as academic papers, high-level corporate reports, government documents, and
newspapers; this is due to the large number of homonyms that have resulted from extended
borrowing of Chinese words.
The issue of ambiguity is the main hurdle in any effort to "cleanse" the Korean language of
Chinese characters. Characters convey meaning visually, while alphabets convey guidance to
pronunciation, which in turn hints at meaning. As an example, in Korean dictionaries, the
phonetic entry for 기사 gisa yields more than 30 different entries. In the past, this ambiguity
had been efficiently resolved by parenthetically displaying the associated hanja.
In North Korea, the government, wielding much tighter control than its sister government to
the south, has banned Chinese characters from virtually all public displays and media, and
mandated the use of Hangul in their place.
Vietnamese
Although now nearly extinct in Vietnamese, varying scripts of Chinese characters (hán tự)
were once in widespread use to write the language, although hán tự became limited to
ceremonial uses beginning in the 19th century. Similarly to Japan and Korea, Chinese
(especially Classical Chinese) was used by the ruling classes, and the characters were
eventually adopted to write Vietnamese. To express native Vietnamese words which had
different pronunciations from the Chinese, Vietnamese developed the Chu Nom script which
used various methods to distinguish native Vietnamese words from Chinese. Vietnamese is
currently exclusively written in the Vietnamese alphabet, a derivative of the Latin alphabet.
XVIII
Rare and complex characters
Zhé, "verbose"
Nàng, "poor enunciation due to snuffle"
Biáng3
Often a character not commonly used (a "rare" or "variant" character) will appear in a
personal or place name in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (see Chinese name,
Japanese name, Korean name, and Vietnamese name, respectively). This has caused problems
as many computer encoding systems include only the most common characters and exclude
3
Biáng biáng noodles are a a type of noodle popular in China's Shaanxi province. The noodle is called biáng bi
áng miàn in Mandarin. The noodles, touted as one of the "ten strange wonders of Shaanxi" (陝西十大怪), are
described as being like a belt, due to their thickness and length. The "Noodle King" chain in Beijing (梆梆麵北
京連鎖店) serves biáng biáng noodles.
There are a number of ditties familiar to Shaanxi residents used as mnemonics to aid recall of how the character
is written. One version is as follows: A stroke rises up to heaven (一點上了天),/and the yellow river has two
bends (黃河兩道灣)./The character "eight" (八) opens its mouth (八字大張口),and the character "speak (言)"
walks in (言字往進走)./You make a twist (你一扭), and I make a twist (我一扭),/you grow (你一長), I grow
(我一長),/and we add a horse (馬) king in between (當中加個馬大王)./The heart character forms the base (心字
底),/the moon (月) character stands at the side(月字旁),/and we ride a carriage to tour the streets of Xianyang
(坐着車車逛咸陽).
XIX
the less oft-used characters. This is especially a problem for personal names which often
contain rare or classical, antiquated characters.
People who have run into this problem include Taiwanese politicians Wang Chien-shien (王
建煊, pinyin Wáng Jiànxuān) and Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃, pinyin Yóu Xīkūn), ex-PRC Premier
Zhu Rongji ( 朱 镕 基 Zhū Róngjī), and Taiwanese singer David Tao ( 陶 喆 Táo Zhé).
Newspapers have dealt with this problem in varying ways, including using software to
combine two existing, similar characters, including a picture of the personality, or, especially
as is the case with Yu Shyi-kun, simply substituting a homophone for the rare character in the
hope that the reader would be able to make the correct inference. Japanese newspapers may
render such names and words in katakana instead of kanji, and it is accepted practice for
people to write names for which they are unsure of the correct kanji in katakana instead.
There are also some extremely complex characters which have understandably become rather
rare. According to Bellassen (1989), the most complex Chinese character is zhé listen
(help·info) (pictured right, top), meaning "verbose" and boasting sixty-four strokes; this
character fell from use around the 5th century. It might be argued, however, that while
boasting the most strokes, it is not necessarily the most complex character (in terms of
difficulty), as it simply requires writing the same sixteen-stroke character 龍 lóng (lit.
"dragon") four times in the space for one.
The most complex character found in modern Chinese dictionaries is 齉 nàng listen (help·info)
(pictured right, middle), meaning "snuffle" (that is, a pronunciation marred by a blocked
nose), with "just" thirty-six strokes. The most complex character that can be input using the
Microsoft New Phonetic IMA 2002a for Traditional Chinese is 龘 tà "the appearance of a
dragon in flight"; it is composed of the dragon radical represented three times, for a total of 16
× 3 = 48.
In Japanese, an 84-stroke kokuji exists [9]— it is composed of three "cloud" (雲) characters
on top of the abovementioned triple "dragon" character (龘). Also meaning "the appearance of
a dragon in flight", it is pronounced おとど otodo, たいと taito, and だいと daito.
The most complex character still in use may be biáng (pictured right, bottom), with 57
strokes, which refers to Biang Biang Noodles, a type of noodle from China's Shaanxi
province. This character along with syllable biang cannot be found in dictionaries. The fact
that it represents a syllable that does not exist in any Standard Mandarin word means that it
could be classified as a dialectal character.
In contrast, the simplest character is 一 yī ("one") with just one horizontal stroke. The most
common character in Chinese is 的 de, a grammatical particle functioning as an adjectival
marker and as a clitic genitive case analogous to the English ’s, with eight strokes. The
average number of strokes in a character has been calculated as 9.8;[4] it is unclear, however,
whether this average is weighted, or whether it includes traditional characters.
Another very simple Chinese logograph is the character 〇 (líng), which simply refers to the
number zero. For instance, the year 2000 would be 二〇〇〇年. The logograph 〇 is a native
Chinese character, and its earliest documented use is in 1247 AD during the Southern Song
dynasty period, found in a mathematical text called 數 術 九 章 (Sh ǔ Shù Ji ǔ Zhāng
"Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections"). It is not directly derived from the Hindi-Arabic
XX
numeral "0".[5] Interestingly, being round, the character does not contain any traditional
strokes.
XXI
“Classical Chinese”
“Classical Chinese” 古文 or Literary Chinese 文言文 is a traditional style of written
Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of old forms of Chinese, making it different
from any modern spoken form of Chinese. However, the distinction between Literary and
Classical, Literary and Vernacular Chinese are blurry. Classical Chinese was once used for
almost all formal correspondence before and during the beginning of the 20th century, not
only in China but also in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Among Chinese speakers, Classical
Chinese has been largely replaced by Vernacular Chinese (白話, baihua), a style of writing
that is closer to modern spoken Mandarin Chinese, while speakers of non-Chinese languages
have largely abandoned Classical Chinese in favor of local vernaculars.
Literary Chinese written for a Korean audience is known as Hanmun; for a Japanese audience,
it is known as Kanbun (in characters both are written as 漢文, meaning written language of
the Han); and for a Vietnamese audience, it is Chữ nho (字儒).
Definitions
While the terms Classical Chinese and Literary Chinese are commonly used interchangeably,
this is not strictly accurate. Sinologists generally agree that they are in fact different things.
By most academic definitions, Classical Chinese (古文, Pinyin Gǔwén, "Ancient Writing"; or
more literally 古典漢語 Gǔdiǎn Hànyǔ "Classical Chinese") refers to the written language of
China from the Zhou Dynasty, and especially the Spring and Autumn Period, through to the
end of the Han Dynasty. Classical Chinese is therefore the language used in many of China's
most influential books, such as the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius and the Daodejing.
(The language of even older texts, such as the Shijing, is sometimes called Archaic Chinese.)
Literary Chinese (文言文, Wényánwén, "Literary Writing", or more colloquially just 文言
Wényán) is the form of written Chinese used from the end of the Han Dynasty to the early
20th century when it was replaced by vernacular written Chinese (Baihua). Literary Chinese
diverged more and more from Classical Chinese as the dialects of China became more and
more disparate and as the Classical written language became less and less representative of
the spoken language. At the same time, Literary Chinese was based largely upon the Classical
language, and writers frequently borrowed Classical language into their Literary writings.
Literary Chinese therefore shows a great deal of similarity to Classical Chinese, even though
the similarity decreased over the centuries.
This situation, usage of Literary Chinese among China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, can be
compared to the coexistence of the universal Latin language and the more local Latin-derived
Romance languages in Europe, as well as the position of Classical Arabic relative to the
various regional vernaculars in Arab lands. The Romance languages continued to evolve,
influencing Latin texts of the same period, so that by the Middle Ages, Latin included many
usages that would have baffled the Romans. The coexistence of Classical Chinese and the
native languages of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam can be compared to the use of Latin in
countries that natively speak non-Latin-derived Germanic languages or Slavic languages, or
to the position of Arabic in Persia and India.
XXII
Pronunciation
The shape of the Seal script character for "harvest" (which later came to mean "year") probably came from the
character for "person." A hypothesized pronunciation for each character may explain the resemblance.
Chinese characters are not alphabetic and do not reflect sound changes, and the tentative
reconstruction of Old Chinese is an endeavour only a few centuries old. As a result, Classical
Chinese is not read with a reconstruction of Old Chinese pronunciation; instead, it is either
read with the pronunciations of the reader's own variety of Chinese, such as modern Mandarin
or Cantonese; or, in varieties of Chinese (e.g. Southern Min) that have a special set of
pronunciation used for Classical Chinese or vocabulary and usage borrowed from Classical
Chinese usage. (In practice, all varieties of Chinese combine these two extremes; Mandarin
and Cantonese, for example, also have words that are pronounced one way in colloquial usage
and another way when used in Classical Chinese or in specialized terms coming from
Classical Chinese, though the system is not as extensive as that of Southern Min.)
Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese readers of Classical Chinese use systems of pronunciation
specific to their own languages. For example, Japanese speakers use On'yomi and (more
rarely) Kun'yomi, which are the ways kanji, or Chinese characters, are read when they are
used to write in Japanese. Kunten, a system that aids Japanese speakers with Classical
Chinese word order, was also used.
Since the pronunciation of Old Chinese or other forms of historical Chinese (such as Middle
Chinese) have long been lost, characters which once rhymed in poetry may no longer do so
(more often in Mandarin and rarely in Cantonese), or vice versa. Poetry and other rhymebased writing thus becomes less coherent than the original reading must have been. However,
some characteristics of modern Chinese dialects adhere more closely to the original
pronunciations than others, as evidenced by the preservation of rhyme structures. Some
believe wenyan literature, especially poetry, sounds better when read in certain dialects
believed to be closer to ancient pronunciations, such as Cantonese or Southern Min.
Another phenomenon that is common in reading Classical Chinese is homophony, or words
that sound the same. More than 2500 years of sound change separates Classical Chinese from
any modern language or dialect, so when reading Classical Chinese in any modern variety of
Chinese (especially Mandarin) or in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese, many characters which
XXIII
originally had different pronunciations have become homonyms. There is a famous Classical
Chinese essay written in the early 20th-century by linguist Y. R. Chao called the Lion-Eating
Poet in the Stone Den which illustrates this. It is perfectly comprehensible when read, but
contains only words that are now pronounced "shi1", "shi2", "shi3" and "shi4" in Standard
Mandarin (the numbers indicate the four tones). In addition, literary Chinese, by its very
nature as a written language employing a logographic writing system, can often get away with
the use of homophones that even in oral Old Chinese would not have been distinguishable in
any way.
The situation is analogous with some English words that sound the same, such as "meet" and
"meat". These two words were pronounced /meːt/ and /mɛːt/ respectively during the time of
Chaucer, as evident by spelling. Today they sound the same, but are distinguished by spelling.
English spelling is only a few centuries old and is a sound-based system that has kept pace
with sound changes to an extent, so such examples are not very common; the Chinese writing
system is, by contrast, several thousand years old and logographic, so such examples are more
common and exist for a high proportion of characters.
Grammar and Lexicon
Wenyan is distinguished from baihua in its style that appears extremely concise and compact
to modern Chinese speakers and to some extent the use of different lexical items (i.e.,
vocabulary). In terms of conciseness and compactness, for example, wenyan rarely uses
morphemes composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all morphemes are of one syllable
only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Chinese dialects where two-syllable
morphemes are more common. In terms of lexicons, Literary Chinese has more pronouns
compared to the modern vernacular. In particular, whereas Mandarin has one general
character to refer to the first-person pronoun ("I"/"me"), Literary Chinese has several, many
of which are used as part of 客套語 (honorific language), and several of which have different
grammatical uses (first-person collective, first-person possessive, etc.).
This phenomenon exists, in part, because two-syllable morphemes evolved in Chinese to
represent more objects and concepts in life: an expansion of vocabulary. This evolution
differs from, for example, a similar phenomenon in English like the pen/pin merger of the
American South. Because the two sound alike, a certain degree of confusion can occur unless
one adds qualifiers like "writing pen" and "stick pin". Since each Chinese character is a
complete unit of a morpheme, any two-character morpheme is actually understood by its 2
morphemes. In Chinese, the equivalent of the morpheme "Psychology" in the English sense is
"Psychos Logos". Each character in a morpheme has its complete and independent function,
not inseparable from the morpheme. For instance, wenyan is understood as "wen yan".
Having wenyan in one word is a practise extended by the romanization efforts advocated by
the communist regime in Mainland China.
Since wenyan is an imitation of Old Chinese, it has almost none of the two-syllable
morphemes present in modern Chinese languages. For the same reason, wenyan is much more
ready to drop subjects, verbs, objects, etc. when their meaning is understood or readily
inferred; wenyan did not develop a subject inanimate pronoun ("it" used as a subject) until
quite late. As a result, a sentence that may take 20 characters in baihua can often be rendered
in wenyan in four or five.
There are also differences in lexicon, especially in grammatical particles, as well as in syntax.
XXIV
In addition to grammar and vocabulary differences, wenyan can be distinguished by literary
and cultural differences: an effort to maintain parallelism and rhythm, even in prose works,
and its extensive use of cultural allusions, thereby also contribute to the brief style.
Classical Chinese grammar and lexicon is also significantly different from that of Literary
Chinese. For example, increasing use of 是 (Modern Mandarin shì) as a copula ("to be")
rather than as a near demonstrative ("this"), and the appearance of 這 (Modern Mandarin zhè)
taking its place as such, is a hallmark of Literary Chinese. Literary also tends to use far more
two-character combinations than Classical.
Teaching and Use
Wenyan was the only form used in Chinese literary works until the May Fourth Movement,
and was also heavily used in Japan and Korea. Ironically, Classical Chinese was used to write
the Hunmin Jeongeum in which the modern Korean alphabet (Hangul) was promulgated and
the essay by Hu Shi in which he argued against using Classical Chinese and in favor of
baihua. Exceptions to the use of wenyan were vernacular novels such as The Dream of the
Red Chamber, which was considered low class at the time.
Today, pure wenyan is occasionally used in formal or ceremonial occasions. The National
Anthem of the Republic of China for example, is in wenyan. In practice there is a socially
accepted continuum between baihua and wenyan. For example, most notices and formal
letters are written with a number of stock wenyan expressions (e.g. salutation, closing).
Personal letters, on the other hand, are mostly written in baihua, but with some wenyan
phrases sometimes, depending on the subject matter, the writer's level of education, etc.
Letters (and/or essays) written completely in wenyan today may be considered quaint, oldfashioned, or even pretentious by some, but may seem impressive to others.
Most Chinese people with at least a middle school education are able to read basic wenyan,
because the ability to read (but not write) wenyan is part of the Chinese middle school and
high school curricula and is part of the college entrance examination. Wenyan is taught
primarily by presenting a classical Chinese work and including a baihua gloss that explains
the meaning of phrases. Tests on classical Chinese are often essentially translation exercises
that ask the student to express the meaning of a paragraph in baihua, using multiple choice.
In addition, many works of literature in wenyan (such as Tang poetry) have major cultural
influences. However, even with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, wenyan can be
difficult to understand, even by native speakers of Chinese, because of its heavy use of
literary references and allusions as well as its extremely abbreviated style.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_Lexicon
XXV
Historical Chinese Phonology
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past.
It draws its data from rime books and rime tables of Middle Chinese era, such as Qieyun and
Guangyun, modern dialects/languages such as Hakka, Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Min, etc. and from
Sino-Xenic pronunciations of Chinese vocabulary such as those found in Vietnamese,
Japanese and Korean (which have, unlike Chinese, historically been written according to
sound). Moreover, data can also be found in the rendering of foreign words into Chinese
characters where the foreign language is fairly well understood, itself having a known
phonological history.
Western linguists such as Bernhard Karlgren began to study the problem of Middle Chinese
around the beginning of the twentieth century. Insight to the phonology of this era was further
gained with the discovery of the Qieyun in the Dunhuang Caves in the 1930's. The work had
earlier been considered lost. Karlgren, who based his work on much later rime dictionaries,
suggested that the Middle Chinese phonology was the language of the Sui-Tang period.
Today, this view has been replaced by the idea that the reconstruction represents the widest
distinction in rime categories between a number of existing dialects of the time.
The reconstruction of Old Chinese is more controversial than Middle Chinese since it
extrapolates from the Middle Chinese data, but compares the riming of works of poetry such
as the Shijing (詩經), one of the earliest Chinese written texts. Some insights into the
phonology of Chinese in the distant past were made before Western phonological practices
became known, such as the work of the Qing Dynasty scholar Duan Yucai.
Reconstruction from rime tables and foreign languages runs into one major criticism: that it
does not use the actual data available today, in the form of the spoken Chinese languages. The
comparative method, for example, has been almost completely unused in reconstructing
Chinese phonology. The rime tables themselves have also been criticized as not being faithful
chroniclers of contemporary pronunciation. Instead, critics argue, the rime tables were
designed to help contemporary authors plug by then already anachronistic rimes into preexisting poetic forms, rather than actually recording what the words sounded like.
1. Old Chinese
Old Chinese (formerly called Archaic Chinese) (Simplified Chinese: 上古汉语, Traditional
Chinese: 上古漢語; pinyin: shànggǔ hànyǔ), refers to the Chinese spoken during the Zhou
Dynasty (10th century BC – 256 BC). The term is usually used in Historical Chinese
phonology, which tries to reconstruct the way in which Old Chinese was pronounced.
Since Old Chinese was the language spoken by Chinese when classical works such as the
Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and the Tao Te Ching were written, Old Chinese was
preserved for the next two millennia in the form of Classical Chinese, a style of written
Chinese that emulates the grammar and vocabulary of Old Chinese as presented in those
works. Classical Chinese was for two millennia the usual language used for official purposes
in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. However, there is great variation within Classical
Chinese, based mainly on when something was written, and the Classical Chinese of more
XXVI
recent writers, as well as that found outside of China, would probably be difficult for someone
from Confucius's era to understand.
The phonology of Old Chinese was imperfectly preserved in Classical Chinese, because the
way the Chinese writing system indicates pronunciation is much less clear than the way an
alphabet shows it. As a result, the pronunciation of Old Chinese can only be tentatively
reconstructed, and is unknown outside academic circles.
Problems
There is much dispute over the precise way in which Old Chinese was pronounced. In recent
decades it is generally agreed that Old Chinese had consonant clusters such as *mr-, *-ts, *drand *zn-, which do not occur in any modern Chinese dialect. Some also believe that Old
Chinese had pharyngealized consonants, such as *ˤz, *ˤd, *ˤs, and *ˤt. However, pharyngeal
and pharyngealized consonants are rare, and only a few languages (such as a number of
Semitic and North Caucasian languages) possess these sounds.
Whether Old Chinese was a tonal language is still a highly controversial subject: some
scholars suggest that the tones of Middle Chinese (and therefore modern spoken Chinese)
evolved from consonants in Old Chinese that have since changed or disappeared.
References


William Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, 1992
Laurent Sagart, The Roots of Old Chinese, 1999
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese#Phonology
2. Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (Traditional Chinese: 中古漢語), or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist
Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Northern and Southern
Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th century - 10th century). The term
"Middle Chinese" is usually used in the context of historical Chinese phonology, which seeks
to reconstruct the pronunciation of Chinese used during these times.
Middle Chinese can be divided into an early period, generally called Early Middle Chinese,
and a later period, Late Middle Chinese. The transition point between Early and Later Middle
Chinese is thought to be during the Mid-Tang Dynasty and is indicated by the phonological
developments. For example, in the rime book Qieyun, bilabial initials [p pʰ b m] characters
are shown, but there were no labiodental initials like f and v, which could be found in Jiyun.
This indicates that a sound change in the pronunciation of Chinese had occurred.
Reconstruction
(Middle) Chinese is not written using an alphabetic script, therefore, sounds cannot be derived
directly from writing. The sounds of Middle Chinese must therefore be inferred from a
number of sources:
XXVII





Modern dialects. Just as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed from modern IndoEuropean languages, so can Middle Chinese be reconstructed (tentatively) from
modern dialects (e.g. Cantonese).
Preserved pronunciation of Chinese characters in borrowed Chinese vocabulary
surviving in non-Chinese languages such as Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese
Classical Chinese poetry from the Middle Chinese period
Rime books. Ancient Chinese philologists devoted a great amount of effort in
summarizing the Chinese phonetic system through rime or rhyme books
Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words
The reconstruction between modern linguists may vary slightly, but they are minor
differences, and fairly uncontroversial, so we could say the Middle Chinese phonology is
fairly well understood and accepted.
Phonetic translations
Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words often provide clues. For example, "Dravida"
was translated by religious scribes into a series of characters 達羅毗荼 that are now read in
Mandarin as /ta35 lwo35 phi35 thu35/ (Pinyin: Dáluópítú). This suggests that Mandarin /wo/
(Pinyin -uo) is the modern reflex of an ancient /a/-like sound, and that the Mandarin tone /35/
is a reflex of ancient voiced consonants. Both of these can in fact be confirmed through
comparison among modern Chinese dialects.
Rime dictionaries
There was a profuse output of Chinese poetry during the Tang era, with a rigid verse structure
that relied on the rime and tone of the final characters in lines of poetry. Middle Chinese as
embodied in rime dictionaries (or rime books) were a primary aid to authors in composing
rhyming poetry.
The 601 AD Qieyun rime dictionary is our earliest fixed record of the phonology of Chinese
pronunciation, albeit without the aid of phonetic letters, but entries that are indexed under a
rigorous hierarchy of tone, rime, and onset. Only fragments or incomplete copies have
survived until a chance discovery of a version of it from the Tang Dynasty in the caves of
Dunhuang. Later expanded rime dictionaries such as the eleventh-century Song Dynasty
Guangyun and Jiyun survive to the present day. The latter being essentially extended versions
of the Qieyun, and until the Dunhuang discovery, the Guangyun was the base from which
Middle Chinese was reconstructed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese
Links
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Chinese Phonological History, Dylan W.H. Sung
Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology, Guillume Jacques
Periodization of Chinese Phonology, Marjorie K.M Chan
XXVIII
Research Tools Premodern Chinese Language: Dictionaries
1 Chinese Premodern dictionaries
(1) Erya 爾雅 [Examples of Refined Usage]. 3rd century BC.
Index:
Erya yinde (Index to Erh Ya) 爾雅引得. Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series,
Supplement 18.
(2) Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 [Elucidations of the Signs and Explications of the Graphs].
Compiled by Xu Shen 訏慎, 100 AD.
The Shuowen jiezi is best consulted in one of its annotated editions, which include materials
drawn from the later philological tradition. The two most important are:
Shuowen jiezi gulin 說文解字詁林 [A Forest of Glosses on the Shuowen jiezi]. Compiled by
Ding Fubao 丁福保, 1932. Repr. Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1959.
Shuowen jiezi zhu 說文解字注 [Commentary to the Shuowen jiezi]. Compiled by Duan Yucai
段玉裁, 1807. Several reprints, including Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1970.
Index:
(3) Kangxi zidian 康熙字典 [Dictionary of the Kangxi Emperor]. Compiled by Zhang Yushu
張玉書, Chen Tingjing 陳廷敬, et al., 1716. Several reprints, including Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju, 1980.
(4) Peiwen yunfu 佩文韻府 [Additional Repository from the Storehouse of Rhymes].
Compiled by Zhang Yushu 張玉書 et al., 1711. Repr. Shanghai: Shangwu guji chubanshe,
1983.
2 Rhyming Dictionaries
(1) Guang yun. 廣 韻 [Enlarged Collection of Rhymes]. Originally compiled in A. D. 601 by
Lu Fa-yan 陸 法 言 under the title Qie Yun 切韻 [Book of Rhymes, using the method of ‚fan
qie’], revised by Sun Mian 孫愐 in A.D. 751 under the Titel Tang yun 唐 韻 [Tang Rhymes],
both texts are lost. Revised and enlarged under imperial auspices in 1011 by Chen Peng-nien
陳 彭 年, Qiu Rong 邱 雍 and others, and published under the present title. [SBBY, v. 344348].
(2) Ji yun. 集 韻[Collection of rhymes]. Compiled under imperial auspices by Ding Du 丁 度
and others in 1037 and possibly completed by Sima Guang 司 馬 光 in 1067. [Si bu bei yao
四 部 備 要 (SBBY), v. 349-358].
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(3) Shi ci qu yun zong jian. [Collection of rhymes in Shi, Ci and Qu]. 詩 詞 曲 韻 總 檢.
Compiled by Lu Yuanzhun. Taipei: Cheng zhong shuju, 1968.
3 Dictionaries of pre-modern and literary Chinese
(1) Ciyuan 辭源 [The origin of words]. Edited by Lu Erkui 陸爾奎 et al. Shanghai: Shangwu
yinshuguan, 1915. Several reprints.
Totally revised edition. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1979-1983, 4 vols.
(2) Couvreur, Seraphin. Dictionnaire classique de la langue chinoise. Revised edition.
Hsienhsien: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1911.
(3) Giles, Herbert A. Chinese-English Dictionary. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1911-12.
(4) Karlgren, Bernhard. Grammata Serica Recensa. Stockholm: The Museum of Far Eastern
Antiquities, 1972. Originally published in 1957.
Vide “Dictionary of Old & Middle Chinese: Bernhard Karlgren's 'Grammata Serica
Recensa'. Alphabetically Arranged” (Studia Orientalia Gothoburgensia Number 11),
compiled by Tor Ulving.
For new developments in the research of Old Chinese phonology vide W.H. BAXTER. A Handbook of Old
Chinese Phonology (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs; 64). Berlin & New York: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1992.
(5) Mathews, Robert H. Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary. Revised edition. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1944. Several reprints.
(6) Pulleyblank, Edwin G. Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle
Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 1991.
(7) Ricci Institut. Dictionnaire Ricci de caractère chinois. 2 volumes et 1 index. Paris and
Taipei: Institut Ricci, 1999.
(8) Jiaguwen zidian 甲骨文字典. Compiled by Xu Zhongshu 徐中舒 , Chengdu 1988, 41995.
(9) Shirakawa Shizuka 白川静, Jitsû 字通, Tôkyô : Heibonsha 平凡社, 1996.
A new dictionary of Chinese characters arranged in gojūon-order by on reading. Includes
10,000 characters. Each entry gives variant forms, readings, etymology, many compounds and
their meanings. Indexed by number of strokes, radical, kun reading, and "four corner table."
(10) Shirakawa Shizuka, Jikun 字訓 , Tôkyô : Heibonsha, 1996.
A dictionary of documenting the Japanese use of Chinese characters used in early Japanese
texts; showing how ideograms from a different culture helped mold the Japanese language.
Includes about 1821 words. Useful for studying the importation of characters into Japan and
how they were used in Japan.
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(11) Shirakawa Shizuka, Jitô 字統 , Tôkyô: Heibonsha, 1994.
An etymology dictionary of Chinese characters , explaining how kanji developed.
4 Small Size Dictionaries
(1) Jianming gu hanyu cidian 簡明古漢 語詞典 [A Concise Dictionary of Old Chinese].
Compiled by Shi Dong 史東. Kunming: Yunnan Renmin Chubanshe, 1985. [JTZ/FTZ]4
(2) Gu hanyu changyong zi zidian 古漢語常用字字典 [A Dictionary of Common Words in
Old Chinese]. Edited by Gu hanyu changyong zi zidian bianxie zu. Beijing: Shangwu
yinshuguan, 1989. [JTZ/FTZ]
(3) Xinhua zidian with English Translation 汉英双解新华字典. Beijing: Shangwu
yinshuguan, 2000. For modern use, provides basic informations for Ancient Chinese too.
Examplary sentences with pinyin-transcription. . [JTZ/FTZ]
(4) Gu Hanyu da cidian 古汉语大词典 Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2000. Based
on the „Ci hai“, 2613 pp. . [JTZ/FTZ]
(5) Wang Li Gu Hanyu zidian 王力 古漢語字典, Bejing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000. [FTZ]
5 Comprehensive dictionaries
(1) Dai kanwa jiten 大漢和辭典 [Chinese-Japanese dictionary]. Edited by Morohashi Tetsuji
諸橋轍次. Tokyo: Taishûkan shoten, 1955-60, 13 vols. Revised edition with a supplementary
index volume, 1989-90.
(2) Hanyu da cidian 漢語大辭典 [Great Chinese dictionary]. Edited by Luo Zhufeng 羅竹風.
12 vols. plus index. Shanghai: Cishu chubanshe, 1986-94. Also available on CD-ROM.
(3) Hanyu da zidian 漢語大字典 [Great dictionary of Chinese characters]. Edited by Hanyu
da zidian weiyuanhui. 8 vols. Wuhan: Hubei cishu chubanshe and Sichuan cishu chubanshe,
1986-1989.
(4) Zhongwen da cidian 中文大辭典 [Great dictionary of the Chinese language]. Edited by
Zhang Qiyun 張其昀. 40 vols. Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo, 1962-68. Revised edition,
1973, 10 vols. Based on the Dai kanwa jiten.
4
JTZ/FTZ.: Haupteinträge in jiantizi, Index verzeichnet fantizi.
XXXI
Dictionaries of Modern Chinese
Chû-Nichi Dai jiten 中日大辞典. Compiled by Aichi Chû-Nichi Dai jiten hensan shohan 愛
知中日大辞典編纂処編. Tokyo 1968. Revised edition 1997.
Ci hai 辭 海. Revised edition by Ci hai bianji weiyuanhui. Shanghai: Ci shu chubanshe, 1979.
Several reprints.
Chinesisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, 2 Bde, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1985.
DeFrancis, John, ed. The ABC [Alphabetically Based Computerized] Chinese-English
Dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996.
Contains, as Appendix 1, “Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography, by the Commission for Pinyin
Orthography, State Language Commission, PRC.” The document is in English. Among the many interesting
features of this new dictionary is the arrangement of entries. Basically, arrangement is by pinyin spelling of
whole terms rather than by spelling of syllables. Thus lingwai [ling wai] precedes linzhong [lin zhong] because g
comes before z. For terms having the same sequence of letters, such as shishi, arrangement is by tone of the first
syllable: first-neutral, first-first, first-second, first-third, first-fourth; second-neutral, second-first, and so on.
Iwanami Chugokugo jiten 岩 波 中 國 語 辭 典. Compiled by Kuraishi Takeshiro 石 武 四 郎.
Iwanami Shoten, 1963. Modern literary terms.
Lin Yu-t'ang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage. Hong Kong: Chinese University
of Hong Kong, 1972.
Good for pronunciation; poor for PRC materials. Separate Wade-Giles index also available from Chinese
University of Hong Kong. More accurate then Mathew's (see below), distinguishes modern from classical usages,
and gives best English equivalent for Chinese phrases.
A New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary. Compiled by Liang Shih-chiu. Taipei: The Far
East Book Co., 1971. Good for Taiwan materials.
Yuandong Hanying da cidian 遠東漢英大辭典. Compiled by Zhang Fangjie 張芳杰 , Taibei
1993 .
Xiandai hanyu cidian 現代漢語詞典 [Dictionary of modern Chinese]. Revised edition.
Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1996. Several reprints.
Xin Han De cidian 新汉德词典 Das Neue Chinesisch-Deutsche Wörterbuch. Beijing:
Shangwu yinshuguan, 1985
Xinhua zidian 新華字典 [New China dictionary]. Revised edition. Beijing: Shangwu
yinshuguan, 1998.
Grand dictionnaire Ricci de la langue chinoise. Compiled by Ricci Institute, Paris 2001
XXXII