The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4,500 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 dynasty (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE),[2][3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.[4][5]: 108 

Sino-Tibetan ancestry

After using a 2019 database of comparative linguistic data developed by Laurent Sagart to identify sound correspondences and establish cognates, phylogenetic relationships among Chinese languages can be reconstructed, with estimates of homelands and periods of migration[6]

Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, a group of languages that all descend from Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The relationship between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research and controversy, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

The main difficulty in both of these efforts is that, while there is very good documentation that allows for the reconstruction of the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the point where Chinese split from the rest of the Sino-Tibetan languages. This is actually a common problem in historical linguistics, a field which often incorporates the comparative method to deduce these sorts of changes. Unfortunately the use of this technique for Sino-Tibetan languages has not as yet yielded satisfactory results, perhaps because many of the languages that would allow for a more complete reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood.

Therefore, despite their affinity, the common ancestry of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages remains an unproven hypothesis.[7] Categorisation 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 relied on Karlgren's insights and methods.

Old Chinese

Old Chinese, sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", is genetically related 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).[8] In the later early and middle Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE), writing which descended from the Shang is found texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artefacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the 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, Korean, and Vietnamese 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 Qing dynasty philologists.

Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese was the form of the language as used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasty from the 6th to the 10th centuries CE. It can be divided into an early period, which can be shown by the Qieyun rime dictionary dating to 601, and its later redaction the Guangyun, and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by 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 summarise the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words.

Spoken Chinese

The development of the spoken Chinese from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the northeast to the southwest of the country, use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to the open plains of northern China, in contrast to the mountains and rivers of southern China which enabled a greater linguistic diversity.

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 as early as the Qing dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Empire had already been setting up orthoepy academies to conform pronunciation to the Beijing standard, but had little success. During the late 19th century, the Beijing dialect finally replaced the Nanjing dialect in the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their local languages for most aspects of life. The area where the new Beijing court dialect was used was thus fairly limited.

This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong and Macau) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Standard Chinese. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in mainland China and on Taiwan. At the time that Mandarin was being widely introduced in mainland China and Taiwan, the British colony of Hong Kong did not use it at all. In Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and parts of Guangxi, the language of daily life, education, formal speech and business remains Cantonese. Due to historic trade and travel of foreign merchants, the Chinese language has adopted a significantly wide array of Japanese words historically which have been adopted in conjunction with Chinese dialect, accent and pronunciation, referred to as the sinification of foreign words. As a result, many lexicographers pass this off due to historical intervention by Chinese historians to not include or forget to include as part of imported foreign words and because of the evolution of languages; most Han characters have a single reading and would have lost the previous vocal reading in correlation to using the new reading institutionally and therefore becoming mainstream. This also applies to Mongolian vocabulary adopted from Southern Mongolia through leading historical figures and dynasties.

Written Chinese

During the reign of the dynasties, guanhua ('officials' speech'), which was almost exclusively utilised by the literati and bureaucrats of Beijing, was the widely most used form of writing. With a standardised writing system for all official documents and communication, unification of the mutually unintelligible Chinese languages was possible. After the establishment of the Kuomintang (KMT), the 1913 Conference on Unification of Pronunciation planned to widely use and teach Mandarin as the official national standard, changing guanhua to guoyu ('national language').[9] Continuing previous policies, the People's Republic of China sought to further standardise a common language, now dubbed Standard Chinese, for national and political unity. In aims of increasing the country' literacy rate, 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.[10]

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.[11]

See also

Notes

    References

    Citations

    1. ↑ Norman 1998, p. 4.
    2. ↑ Kern 2010, p. 1.
    3. ↑ Keightley 1978, p. xvi.
    4. ↑ Bagley, Robert (2004). "Anyang writing and the origin of the Chinese writing system". In Houston, Stephen (ed.). The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge University Press. pp. 190–249. ISBN 978-0-521-83861-0.
    5. ↑ Boltz, William G. (1999). "Language and Writing". In Loewe, Michael; Shaughnessy, Edward L. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC. Cambridge University Press. pp. 74–123. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521470308.004. ISBN 978-0-521-47030-8. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
    6. ↑ Sagart et al. 2019, pp. 10319–10320.
    7. ↑ Norman 1998, pp. 12–16.
    8. ↑ Asia for Educators, Early China and the Shang.
    9. ↑ DeFrancis 1984, p. 224.
    10. ↑ DeFrancis 1984, p. 295.
    11. ↑ Norman 1998, p. 3.

    Works cited

    This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.