How to speak in classical Chinese

1. How to talk to others in classical Chinese

Classical Chinese is an article written in classical Chinese, referred to as "classical Chinese". It can only be read and written, but cannot be "spoken". What can be spoken is called "spoken language", "language" and "language", not "literary".

Since classical Chinese is not suitable for spoken conversation, no one has been able to speak in classical Chinese since ancient times. The ancients read and wrote classical Chinese, and their speech was the social spoken language of that era. We can only know that the population and spoken language of each era were different, but because there are no recordings, it is impossible to know the specific language of each era.

In modern film and television dramas, character dialogues generally refer to the social language used in ancient vernacular, which cannot be completely consistent with the actual situation.

Even "modern literature" is not feasible for speaking. After all, it is a written language. If you say to your new female (male) friend: "From now on, the East Street Western Restaurant will be closed for a few days due to renovations. We urgently need to discuss the dinner location, so we can plan ahead and be prepared." Your friend will not be angry. That’s weird! 2. How the ancients spoke

Ancient times is a very vague concept.

For example, the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period are ancient times, and the Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty are also ancient times to us. But the pre-Qin era of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods was also ancient for the Song and Ming dynasties.

The spoken language in the pre-Qin era was actually the later classical Chinese. The wind in "The Book of Songs" is folk customs, which was the most popular pop music at that time. But it is this "wind" that is not popular to us, and it is not popular even to people of the Tang and Song Dynasties. Because the dialects and popular languages ??of the Pre-Qin Dynasty later evolved into classical Chinese, also known as ancient Chinese.

The ancient prose movement promoted by Liu Zongyuan and Han Yu in the middle of the Tang Dynasty actually advocated the restoration of the pre-Qin language system and the use of pre-Qin vernacular as the writing language.

In the Tang Dynasty, vernacular Chinese was already very different from classical Chinese. By the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, the folk vernacular culture was not much different from the current vernacular. You can look at the suites of the Yuan Dynasty (Southern Opera and Northern Opera). The scripts of this kind of opera are actually written in folk vernacular and are very colloquial. You can also look at Zhu Xi's articles in the Song Dynasty. Although Neo-Confucianism in the Song Dynasty is Chinese philosophy One of the most obscure parts of the book, but Zhu Xi's articles are very popular; the four famous works of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, "A Dream of Red Mansions", "Water Margin", "Journey to the West", and "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" are all vernacular novels, among which The language of "Water Margin" is closer to vernacular, so "Water Margin" and "Jin Ping Mei" have become good materials for understanding the urban life of Ming and Qing Dynasties through language.

"A Dream of Red Mansions" is the highest peak of vernacular novels, and "Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio" is the highest peak of classical Chinese novels. The year Pu Songling died happened to be the year Cao Xueqin was born, and the two books are almost in the same historical era. This shows that vernacular and classical Chinese existed at the same time in the language system of the medieval people.

It was not until after the May 4th Movement and the New Literature Movement that Hu Shi proposed "A Preliminary Proposal for the Reform of Writing" and personally tried the first vernacular poetry collection "Trial Collection", advocating the use of vernacular. At this time, the status of vernacular was at its peak. Coupled with the pace of modernization and modernization, the existence of classical Chinese was almost eliminated in the end. But the vernacular was not invented by Hu Shi; it had already appeared a thousand years ago. 3. How did the people in ancient times speak?

This is a very wide-ranging question. Today's classical Chinese is the spoken language of the pre-Qin period. The representative spoken language at that time was "The Analects of Confucius", while the written language was "Poetry", "Xunzi", etc. The pronunciation was an ancient phonetic system, which was more complex than modern Mandarin Chinese and was divided into thirty rhymes; there were many monosyllabic words and continuous words. See the works of Mr. Wang Li.

For medieval oral language, we can refer to the Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures in the Tang Dynasty. The phonetic pronunciation was the Longluo dialect as the official language. However, ancient writers still advocated that the written language imitate the pre-Qin Dynasty, so there was the ancient prose movement.

Since ancient times, the pronunciation has gradually been dominated by northern Mandarin. Please refer to Yuan Zaju, which is closer to today's Beijing dialect. But the written language system still follows the pre-Qin period.

The unification of official written language and spoken language began in the May Fourth Movement. However, due to the lag in written language, there is still a big gap between today's spoken language and written language. 4. How to say "chat" in classical Chinese

In classical Chinese, or ancient Chinese, the meaning of "chat" is expressed by "talk" or "lun".

The word "chao" has no meaning of conversation, let alone the word "tian".

Words such as "talking about the wind" and "talking loudly" are often used in ancient texts. Modern people also like to use modern vocabulary such as meeting and meeting, but the original meaning of the word "hui" is to meet and gather. The word "hui" for "meeting" does not express the meaning of conversation, but only expresses the meaning of "meeting and gathering". The word "meet" also has no meaning of discussion. It can be said that modern Chinese has gone too far away from Chinese characters, and gradually it is no longer a writing system.

In ancient times, people often used "words" to express themselves when talking to each other. It has the following meanings:

1. Talk; talk

2. Another example: Hua Ye (night talk); Hua Xin (heart-to-heart talk); Hua Yu (friends) Get together to talk about old things)

3. Tell. Such as: Huoxin (oral message); Huokou (dialect, tone; tone)

4. Used at the end of a partial sentence in a hypothetical complex sentence. Such as: If this is the case, I will not participate.

5. It is equivalent to the meaning of chapter chapter. For example, the book "Head of China" is divided into twenty chapters.

Extended information:

In ancient Chinese poetry, various techniques are often used to express the meaning of conversation.

For example, Meng Haoran in the Tang Dynasty visited his old friend's village: "Open the garden in front of the garden, and talk about mulberry and hemp over wine." It means opening the window and facing the garden, drinking wine and talking about the growth of mulberry and hemp. "Hua Sangma" here means chatting.

Another example is "How can you cut the candles from the west window and talk about the rainy night in Bashan." The "talk" here means chatting.