History of the Chinese language

The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, 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), with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.

Proto-Sinitic (before 1250 BCE)

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

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.

Determining that relationship and reconstructing Proto-Sino-Tibetan is challenging. Although there is 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 a common problem in historical linguistics, where the comparative method is used to deduce these changes. This technique has not yet yielded results for Sino-Tibetan languages, likely due to poor documentation of many Sino-Tibetan languages. Therefore, despite their affinity, the common ancestry of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages remains an unproven hypothesis.

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 (1889–1978) in the early 20th century. The system was much revised, but always heavily relied on Karlgren's insights and methods.

Pre-Classical period (1300–500 BCE)

Old Chinese, sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", is ancestral 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). During the first half of the Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE), writing descended from the Shang is found texts including inscriptions on bronze artefacts, the Classic of Poetry, the history of the Book of Documents, and portions of the I Ching. Phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations, as do the pronunciations of borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but was probably still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists.

Classical period (500 BCE – 1 CE)

Words in Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic; as such, each character denoted an independent word. Affixes could be added to form a new word, which was often written with the same single character. In many cases, the pronunciations then diverged due to the systematic sound changes caused by the affixes. For example, many modern readings reflect the departing tone present in Middle Chinese, which many scholars now believe is a reflex of a derivational suffix /*-s/ that served a range of semantic functions in Old Chinese. This is possibly the only example of inflectional morphology extant in what was otherwise an analytic language:

Evolution of character senses as caused by the Old Chinese 去聲 (qùshēng)

Character	OC		MC		mod.	Gloss
傳	*drjon	→	drjwen'	→		'to transmit'
	*drjons	→	drjwenH	→		'a record'
磨	*maj	→	ma	→		'to grind'
	*majs	→	maH	→		'grindstone'
宿	*sjuk	→	sjuwk	→		'to stay overnight'
	*sjuks	→	sjuwH	→		'celestial mansion'
説	*hljot	→	sywet	→		'speak'
	*hljots	→	sywejH	→		'exhort'

Another common sound change occurred between voiced and voiceless initials, though the phonemic voicing distinction has disappeared in most modern varieties. This is believed to reflect an Old Chinese de-transitivising prefix, but scholars disagree on whether the voiced or voiceless form reflects the original root. Each pair of examples below reflects two words of opposite transitivity.

Evolution of character transitivity pairs from Old Chinese

Character	OC		MC		mod.	Gloss
見	*kens	→	kenH	→		'to see'
	*gens	→	henH	→		'to appear'
敗	*prats	→	pæjH	→		'to defeat'
	*brats	→	bæjH	→		'to be defeated'
折	*tjat	→	tsyet	→		'to bend'
	*djat	→	dzyet	→		'to be broken by bending'

Middle Chinese (300–1100)

Middle Chinese was a form of Chinese used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties between the 4th and 10th centuries. It can be divided into two periods: Early Middle Chinese is documented in the Qieyun (601), the first rime dictionary, and its later revision the Guangyun. Late Middle Chinese is 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 summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words.

Early Modern Chinese (1100–1800)

The development of Chinese has been complex. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is due in part to the open plains of northern China, in contrast to the mountains and rivers of southern China that enabled greater linguistic diversity. Moreover, Mandarin, called Guanhua ('officials' speech') was at first based on the Nanjing dialect, and became the dominant vernacular in northern China during the early Qing. It was gradually challenged by the variety used by scholar-officials of Beijing. In the 17th century, the Qing began setting up orthoepy academies to conform pronunciation to the Beijing standard, but had little success.

Modern Chinese (1800 – present)

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, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China continued to use their local varieties 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 of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Standard Chinese in both mainland China and Taiwan, but not Hong Kong or Macau. At the time that it was being widely introduced in these places, the British colony of Hong Kong did not use it at all. In Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and parts of Guangxi, Cantonese remains the everyday language used in business and education. The Chinese language has adopted a wide array of foreign words, which have been adapted to Chinese dialects and pronunciation, referred to as the sinification of foreign words.

After the establishment of the Kuomintang (KMT), the 1913 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation planned to use Guanhua as the basis of a national dialect, redubbing it as Guoyu ('national language'). Continuing previous policies, the People's Republic of China sought to further standardize a common language, now dubbed Standard Chinese, for national and political unity. 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 to improve literacy.

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.

References

Works cited

• Baxter, William H. (1992), A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-110-12324-1
• 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 – via Google Books
• 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
• DeFrancis, John (1984), The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, ISBN 978-0-824-81068-9
• Keightley, David (1978), Sources of Shang history: the oracle-bone inscriptions of bronze-age China, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-02969-9
• Kern, Martin (2010), "Early Chinese literature, beginnings through Western Han", in Owen, Stephen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature: To 1375, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–115, ISBN 978-0-521-85558-7
• Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3
• Sagart, Laurent; Jacques, Guillaume; Lai, Yunfan; Ryder, Robin; Thouzeau, Valentin; Greenhill, Simon J. & List, Johann-Mattis (2019), "Dated language phylogenies shed light on the history of Sino-Tibetan", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116 (21): 10317–10322, Bibcode:2019PNAS..11610317S, doi:10.1073/pnas.1817972116, PMC 6534992, PMID 31061123
  • Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family revealed by new research, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 6 May 2019 – via ScienceDaily
• Tam, Gina Anne (2020), Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-108-77640-0
• Vogelsang, Kai (2021), Introduction to Classical Chinese, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-198-83497-7