What is the history of modern Chinese?

Traditional phonology once divided the history of Chinese phonetics into four stages: ancient, medieval, modern and modern.

According to documents, as early as the pre-Qin period, China appeared "Elegant Language" and Han Dynasty appeared "General Language", both of which were unified written language at that time. However, in ancient society, only a few educated people mastered the written language. Written language is passed down from generation to generation, and it is easy to break away from spoken language, forming a kind of written language that breaks away from spoken language, commonly known as "classical Chinese". Classical Chinese was originally formed on the basis of spoken language, and then it became farther and farther away from spoken language. In this way, in the Tang and Song Dynasties, a new written language was formed on the basis of folk spoken language, which is "vernacular Chinese", and vernacular Chinese has always been closely related to spoken language. After the Song and Yuan Dynasties, a large number of vernacular literature works appeared, including Water Margin, Scholars, Dream of Red Mansions and other literary masterpieces. Although they all have local colors, the basic dialects used are all northern dialects, and they spread to non-northern dialect areas in large numbers, which accelerated the popularization of northern dialects. Many people in non-northern dialect areas have also learned to read and write in vernacular Chinese, which makes vernacular Chinese national to some extent. Vernacular is the source of modern Chinese written language.

At the same time as the spread of vernacular literature, the "Mandarin" represented by Beijing dialect has gradually spread, not only becoming a communication tool for governments at all levels. At the end of Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of Ming Dynasty, Park Simultaneous and Laoqida were two conversational textbooks for Koreans to learn Chinese. They were written in Beijing spoken language and were recognized as representatives of spoken Chinese at that time. In the Qing Dynasty, Yin Zheng Academy was established in Fujian and Guangdong to teach Mandarin, and it was stipulated that people who could not speak Mandarin could not be officials. In this way, the northern "Mandarin" represented by Beijing dialect has become the source of modern Han oral forms.

At the beginning of this century, especially after the May Fourth Movement, with the upsurge of the national democratic revolutionary movement, the above two thoughts merged into one, which accelerated the formation of homophones in modern Chinese. On the one hand, the "vernacular movement" was launched, which shook the dominant position of classical Chinese and made vernacular Chinese a literary language; On the other hand, the development of the "Putonghua Movement" has promoted Beijing dialect to become the standard pronunciation of the national language. These two movements promote and influence each other, which makes the written language and spoken language close to each other, and has a unified standard, forming a modern Mandarin with consistent language and characters, and achieving the status of * * * homonym.