Who invented Chinese?

Chinese is one of the oldest languages ??in the world and one of the languages ??that has been in common use for the longest time. The historical evolution of Chinese is a very interesting question. The Chinese writing system - Chinese characters, are non-phonetic characters. You cannot directly know the historical pronunciation of the same character like phonetic characters. Fortunately, valid information can be found in Chinese characters (especially phonograms), the rhythm of poetry, and the translation of foreign names.

Ancient Chinese

According to legend, there were "ten thousand kingdoms" in the Central Plains during the time of the Yellow Emperor, and three thousand kingdoms during the Xia Dynasty. In the early Zhou Dynasty, 800 princes were enfeoffed, but "the people of the five directions could not understand the language" ("Li") "Record·Kingdom").

Old Chinese existed in the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th century BC). Written records include inscriptions on bronzes, the Book of Songs, the history book Shujing, and parts of the Book of Changes.

According to Chapter 28 of "The Book of Rites: Doctrine of the Mean": "Today we got off the train on the same track, wrote the same article, and acted in the same direction." It can be seen that the unification of language and writing began during the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty.

In the early Spring and Autumn Period, there were more than 170 vassal states recorded. During the Warring States Period, the "Seven Heroes" were formed. "The princes were in charge of political affairs, but they were not unified by the king...the words had different sounds and the characters had different shapes" ("Shuowen Jiezi·Xu").

Hundreds of schools of thought in the pre-Qin period used the synonym of "Yayan" in their writings. "Zi's elegant words, "Poems", "Books", and "Zhao Li" are all elegant words." ("The Analects of Confucius·Shuer")

After the reunification of the Qin Dynasty, the writing was further standardized to Xiaozhuan is the official official script.

Middle Chinese

This kind of Chinese was used in the Sui, Tang and Song dynasties (7th to 10th century AD) and can be divided into "Qie Yun" (601 AD) The early period and the late period reflected in "Guangyun" (10th century AD). Gao Benhan called this stage "ancient Chinese".

Linguists have been able to reconstruct the phonetic system of Medieval Chinese with relative confidence. This evidence comes from several sources: diverse modern dialects, rhymed books, and translations into foreign languages.

Just as Indo-European languages ??can be reconstructed from modern Indo-European languages, Middle Chinese can also be reconstructed from dialects. In addition, ancient Chinese writers spent a lot of energy summarizing the phonetic system of Chinese, and these materials are still the basis for the work of modern linguists. Finally, the pronunciation of Chinese can be learned from translations into foreign languages.

Modern Chinese

Modern Chinese is the Chinese language represented by early vernacular documents between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese.

Modern Chinese

Modern Chinese is a Chinese language based on Northern dialect and based on typical modern vernacular works as its grammatical standard.

Written and Spoken Language

The difference between written and spoken language has always been considerable. Before the vernacular movement during the May 4th Movement, the difference between written language and spoken language was actually the difference between ancient and modern languages. Take the Tang and Song dynasties as an example. At that time, what was spoken was vernacular and what was written was classical Chinese, that is, an ancient style of writing modeled on the pre-Qin philosophers and widely recited famous works such as "Zuo Zhuan" and "Historical Records". This situation can probably be pushed back to the Han Dynasty. and continued until the beginning of the 20th century. Sun Yat-sen's will in 1925 was still written in classical Chinese. However, classical Chinese as a written language itself has also changed over the past 2000 years. After all, it is difficult to imitate the original language, and it is impossible for future generations to imitate the ancient language without being influenced by the spoken language at that time. Some people pointed out that Han Yu's articles were obviously inconsistent with pre-Qin grammar. The ancient writers of the Tongcheng School in the Qing Dynasty imitated the articles of pre-Qin writers and ancient writers of the Tang and Song Dynasties, and the results were of course more mixed. In the late Qing Dynasty, Liang Qichao wrote political articles in a simple classical Chinese. Because it is easy to understand, it became popular and was widely used by newspapers and magazines. At present, most Chinese newspapers and periodicals in Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas still use this style. The literary revolution carried out during the May 4th Movement put forward the idea of ??opposing classical Chinese and promoting vernacular Chinese. This movement swept the country and had far-reaching consequences. In just a few years, vernacular literature gained a firm foothold.

However, the language of this kind of vernacular literary works is not a true spoken language, but is based on northern Mandarin, and is greatly influenced by the vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It also contains varying degrees of dialect components, as well as many emerging vocabulary and Europeanized syntax. Mixed genres. Lu Xun's works can be regarded as typical representatives of this style of writing.

The above are literary works. As for news reports, government announcements, official documents, business contracts, and even personal letters, classical Chinese is often used. On the one hand, this is due to traditional habits, and on the other hand, it is also because classical Chinese has the advantage of conciseness. This situation, nationwide, lasted until the late 1940s. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, classical Chinese completely gave way to vernacular. No one writes classical Chinese anymore, except for telegraphers and those who deliberately imitate the past.

As pointed out above, modern written Chinese is a mixture containing many different levels of language components. This is true both syntactically and lexically. Taking syntax as an example, apart from the parts of written sentences that are the same as spoken language, some of them come from classical Chinese, and later gradually merged into written language and became part of written sentences. For example, "carry out, add to, give, give" are several verbs that are frequently used in written language. The original meaning of these verbs has been blurred, and their main function is to be placed before two-tone verbs to adapt to syntactic and rhythmic requirements. This syntactic structure comes from classical Chinese. The predecessor of "carry out" is "行" (discussed separately), the predecessor of "add" is "jia" (strict control), and the predecessor of "give" and "give" is "yu" (not be held accountable). In classical Chinese syntax, "行, 加, yu" must be preceded by a monosyllabic adverb to form a bisyllabic structure, and the following verb must also be bisyllabic. In modern written language, these verbs are all disyllabic, and they are still required to be followed by disyllabic verbs. The grammatical restrictions are the same.

When modern written language began to form, it inherited some sentence patterns from the language of old vernacular novels. This phase is now over. All we can see are some ruins. For example, the construction of "在+place word" can be placed before the verb ("sitting on the stage") or after the verb ("sitting on the stage"). In Beijing dialect, the preposition of "zai" is preceded by "hee", [āi] or [tǎi], and the postposition of "zai" is preceded by [·t?], without "zai". The use of "in" is inherited from old vernacular novels.

Some written sentence patterns are influenced by foreign languages ??(English, Japanese, Russian, etc.) directly or indirectly (through translated works). An important grammatical phenomenon affecting all written sentence patterns may be cited as an illustration in this regard. As mentioned above, the subject and predicate in Chinese are loosely related. The subject of the sentence often does not need to be said. Some sentences don't even have a subject at all. This is true for both modern spoken language and ancient Chinese. However, modern written language requires that sentences must have a subject in form. If not, the structure will feel incomplete and the logic will not be thorough. This is obviously influenced by Indo-European languages.

The vocabulary characteristic of written language is the large proportion of bisyllabic words. Except for some bisyllabic words inherited from classical Chinese, most of the bisyllabic words in written language have appeared in the past 100 years since the late 19th century. Some of them are borrowed from Japanese (such as economy, cadres, etc.), and the other part are newly created. Most of the newly created words are compound words formed by using original morphemes (written Chinese characters). This way of forming words is productive and has great vitality.

Chinese is precise. I remember that when I was studying in my early years, the Chinese textbooks stated openly: "Taking the path of Pinyin is an inevitable trend for Chinese." The most important reason is that English can be typed, but Chinese cannot. With the development of computer technology, the keyboard input speed of Chinese characters has far exceeded that of English, and the speed is still increasing rapidly. What about English input? But it seems to be stalling.

[Edit this paragraph] The development of Chinese

The word formation of Chinese characters is ingenious. Prefixes at the beginning of words and suffixes at the end of words are commonly used word formation methods in English.

Saccharose (saccharin) and Saccharomycetes (yeast) have the same Latin prefix, but remembering them is not easy even for British and American people, at least for several engineering graduate students whose native language is English that I have tested. so. The one-dimensional string structure is the direct reason why it is not eye-catching and unclear. Let me ask you, if you are a graduate student and don’t even know about yeast and saccharin, how should you feel?

Use Chinese characters to describe it concisely and clearly. Even an uneducated Chinese who has never eaten saccharin or used yeast understands that saccharin may be the "refined part" of sugar and is sweeter than sugar (although this is not exact); yeast is "a Bacteria that cause fermentation.” But English words cannot be composed so simply, and even if they are composed, it may be unacceptable: saccharin=Sugessece="Sugar" "Essence" ("sugar" and "essence" combined), yeast=Yeabacteria="Yeast" "Bacteria" ("fermentation" and "bacteria" combined). Isn't this outrageous?

Different from the one-dimensional string-like suffix and suffix word formation method of Pinyin characters, Chinese characters are formed in a two-dimensional way. For example:

"People" become "prisoners" within four walls without doors;

"Wood" will be "trapped" within four walls without doors. ;

"Dew"--it will be "exposed" to the rain on the "roads" in Malaysia on rainy days;

"Mi" (related to food) ) "Tang" (sound) = "sugar";

"Grass" growing on firewood = "bacteria";

"Wood", "Lin", "Sen" ——They mean tree, woods and forest respectively, but in comparison, which word formation method is better? The answer is clear.

In today's English-speaking society, the Latin roots and early writing methods followed by early English word creation have gradually been abandoned. Similar to the above-mentioned Sugessece and Yeabacteria, they are no joke at all. They are used every day in daily life. All. Different brands of chocolates and candies in stores always have different names. Some names cannot be found in the dictionary. They will appear and disappear with the production of a certain type of chocolate candies from a certain manufacturer. When an Australian reads this word, he will not realize that this is a very popular candy in a certain region of North America. Most of the time, he will just shake his head like the Chinese.

In the era of information technology, Chinese characters are preferred. Do you know about new subject areas such as "Fuzzy Mathematics", "Fuzzy Control" or "Neural Networks"? If you have been exposed to it, you will understand that human art, philosophy, and feelings may not seem "accurate", but in fact they are currently beyond the scope of accurate description by today's human knowledge level. As human cognitive abilities improve, they will gradually be accurately grasped by humans with a new knowledge structure. The new disciplines mentioned above are just a small episode in the prelude to this new knowledge structure. Chinese characters embody Eastern art philosophy and are the cultural heritage of the Chinese nation. Limited to the current level of science and technology, we are still unable to fully understand its wisdom, and its exploration is in the ascendant. This statement is not unfounded. After all, no one realized that the traditional Chinese character publishing industry was going to be eliminated 15 years ago; people 10 years ago did not expect that the input of Chinese characters would be faster than English, and it would be even faster; 5 years ago People in the past did not expect that traditional newspaper media would be gradually eliminated, and that Southern Metropolis Daily would stand on the same starting line as Ta Kung Pao, a century-old newspaper, competing for coded news on the Internet. Who dares to say that Chinese character programming will be impossible or inferior to English in a few years?

Chinese characters are flexible, but they need to be used by flexible people; Chinese characters are smart, but they depend on the development of smart people; Chinese characters are full of wisdom, and they need smart people to realize their value. Be proud of Chinese! Cheers for the enthusiasm and confidence of the Chinese people who firmly believe that the Chinese era is coming!