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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. [ a ] The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period.
Classical Chinese [a] is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. [2] For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century.
Old Chinese had a simpler system with no palatal or retroflex consonants; the more complex system of EMC is thought to have arisen from a combination of Old Chinese obstruents with a following /r/ and/or /j/. [52] Bernhard Karlgren developed the first modern reconstruction of Middle Chinese. The main differences between Karlgren and newer ...
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.
Classical Chinese's most obvious contrast with modern written vernacular Chinese is that the former rarely uses words of more than one character; nearly all Classical words are one character in length. This stands directly in contrast with vernacular Chinese, in which two-character words are extremely common.
The terms "Old Chinese" and "Middle Chinese" refer to long periods of time in and of themselves, during which significant changes occurred. Although there is no standard system for subdividing these periods, the following is an approximate chronology leading from the oldest writings in the oracle bone script up through modern Standard Mandarin:
Modern written Chinese, which replaced Classical Chinese as the written standard as an indirect result of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, is not technically bound to any single variety; however, it most nearly represents the vocabulary and syntax of Mandarin, by far the most widespread Chinese dialectal family in terms of both geographical area ...
The period following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China was characterized by efforts at language reform. [3] Many of the first language reformers of this period were associated with the New Culture Movement, [3] which began around 1916 due to anti-imperialist and anti-traditionalist sentiments which boiled over during the May Fourth Movement, and ...