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Unlike Middle Chinese and the modern Chinese languages, Old Chinese had a significant amount of derivational morphology. Several affixes have been identified, including ones for the verbification of nouns, conversion between transitive and intransitive verbs, and formation of causative verbs. [4]
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.
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 ...
This is a list of extinct languages of Asia, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers, and no spoken descendant. There are 210 languages listed. 18 from Central Asia , 42 from East Asia , 27 from South Asia , 30 from Southeast Asia , 26 from Siberia and 67 from West Asia .
The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ... Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign ...
notes by Johann Flierl, Wilhelm Poland and Georg Schwarz, culminating in Walter Roth's The Structure of the Koko Yimidir Language in 1901. [207] [208] A list of 61 words recorded in 1770 by James Cook and Joseph Banks was the first written record of an Australian language. [209] 1891: Galela: grammatical sketch by M.J. van Baarda [210] 1893: Oromo
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...
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.