Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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. [ a ] The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese.
Although many authors have projected the Middle Chinese palatal medial -j-back to a medial *-j-in Old Chinese, others have suggested that the Middle Chinese medial was a secondary development not present in Old Chinese. Evidence includes the use of type B syllables to transcribe foreign words lacking any such medial, the lack of the medial in ...
The earliest was the Romanisation Interdialectique by French missionaries Henri Lamasse of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and Ernest Jasmin, based on Middle Chinese, followed by linguist Wang Li's Wényán luómǎzì based on Old Chinese in 1940, and then by Chao's General Chinese romanization in 1975. However, none of these systems have ...
Although Old Chinese is known from written records beginning around 1200 BC, the logographic script provides much more indirect and partial information about the pronunciation of the language than alphabetic systems used elsewhere.
Eastern Han Chinese (alternatively Later Han Chinese or Late Old Chinese) is the stage of the Chinese language attested in poetry and glosses from the Eastern Han period (1st–3rd centuries AD). It is considered an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and the Middle Chinese of the 7th-century Qieyun rime dictionary.
This page was last edited on 5 December 2024, at 19:43 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.