- Also called:
- Sinitic languages
- Chinese:
- Han
The early contacts
Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey’ and ‘lion,’ and probably also ‘horse,’ ‘dog,’ and ‘goose,’ are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer—e.g., the name of the Yangtze River, *kruŋ, is still the word for ‘river’—Cantonese kɔŋ, Modern Standard Chinese jiang, pronounced kroŋ and kloŋ in some modern Mon-Khmer languages. Words for ‘tiger,’ ‘ivory,’ and ‘crossbow’ are also Austroasiatic. The names of the key terms of the Chinese calendar (“the branches”) have this same non-Chinese origin. It has been suggested that a great many cultural words that are shared by Chinese and Tai are Chinese loanwords from Tai. Clearly, the Chinese received many aspects of culture and many concepts from the Austroasiatic and Austro-Tai peoples whom they gradually conquered and absorbed or expelled.
From the 1st century ad, China’s contacts with India, especially through the adoption of Buddhism, led to Chinese borrowing from Indo-Aryan (Indic) languages, but, very early, native Chinese equivalents were invented. Sinitic languages have been remarkably resistant to direct borrowing of foreign words. In modern times this has led to an enormous increase in Chinese vocabulary without a corresponding increase in basic meaningful syllables. For instance, tielu ‘railroad’ is based on the same concept expressed in the French chemin de fer, using tie ‘iron’ and lu ‘road’; likewise, dianhua ‘telephone’ is a compound of dian ‘lightning, electricity’ and hua ‘speech.’ A number of such words were coined first in Japanese by means of Chinese elements and then borrowed back into Chinese. The reason that China has avoided the incorporation of foreign words is first and foremost a phonetic one; such words fit very badly into the Chinese pattern of pronunciation. A contributing factor has been the Chinese script, which is ill-adapted to the process of phonetic loans. In creating new words for new ideas, the characters have sometimes been determined first and forms have arisen that cannot be spoken without ambiguity (‘sulfur’ and ‘lutecium’ coalesced as liu, ‘nitrogen’ and ‘tantalum’ as dan). It is characteristic of Modern Standard Chinese that the language from which it most freely borrows is one from its own past: Classical Chinese. In recent years it has borrowed from Southern Sinitic languages under the influence of statesmen and revolutionaries (Chiang Kai-shek was originally a Wu speaker and Mao Zedong a Xiang speaker). Influence from English and Russian (in word formation and syntax) has been increasingly felt.
Pre-Classical Chinese
The history of the Chinese language can be divided into three periods, pre-Classical (c. 1500 bc–c. ad 200), Classical (c. 200–c. 1920), and post-Classical Chinese (with important forerunners as far back as the Tang dynasty).
The pre-Classical period is further divided into Oracular Chinese (Shang dynasty [18th–12th centuries bc]), Archaic Chinese (Zhou and Qin dynasties [1046–207 bc]), and Han Chinese (Han dynasty [206 bc–ad 220]).
Oracular Chinese is known only from rather brief oracle inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells. Archaic Chinese falls into Early, Middle (c. 800–c. 400 bc), and Late Archaic. Early Archaic is represented by bronze inscriptions, parts of the Shujing (“Classic of History”), and parts of the Shijing (“Classic of Poetry”). From this period on, many important features of the pronunciation of the Chinese characters have been reconstructed. The grammar depended to a certain extent on unwritten affixes. The writing system kept apart forms with or without medial consonants, which in some cases were meaningful infixes. Early Archaic Chinese possessed a third-person personal pronoun in three cases (nominative and genitive gyəg, accusative tyəg, and another special genitive kywat, used only with concepts intimately connected with the owner). No other kind of written Chinese until the post-Classical period possessed a nominative of the third-person pronoun, but the old form survived in Cantonese (khöy) and is probably also found in Tai (Modern Thai khăw).
Middle Archaic Chinese is the language of some of the earliest writings of the Confucian school. Important linguistic changes that had occurred between the Early and Middle phases became still more pronounced in Late Archaic, the language of the two major Confucian and Daoist writers, Mencius (Mengzi) and Zhuangzi, as well as of other important philosophers. The grammar by then had become more explicit in the writing system, with a number of well-defined grammatical particles, and it can also be assumed that the use of grammatical affixes had similarly declined. The process used in verb formation and verb inflection that later appeared as tonal differences may at this stage have been manifested as final consonants or as suprasegmental features, such as different types of laryngeal phonation. The word classes included nouns, verbs, and pronouns (each with several subclasses), and particles. The use of a consistent system of grammatical particles to form noun modifiers, verb modifiers, and several types of embedded sentences (i.e., sentences that are made to become parts of another independent sentence) became blurred in Han Chinese and was gone from written Chinese until the emergence of post-Classical Chinese. In Modern Standard Chinese the subordinating particle de combines the functions of several Late Archaic Chinese particles, and the verb particle le and the homophonous sentence particle le have taken over for other Late Archaic forms.
Han and Classical Chinese
Han Chinese developed more polysyllabic words and more specific verbal and nominal (noun) categories of words. Most traces of verb formation and verb conjugation began to disappear. An independent Southern tradition (on the Yangtze River), simultaneous with Late Archaic Chinese, developed a special style, used in the poetry Chuci (“Elegies of Chu”), which was the main source for the refined fu (prose poetry). Late Han Chinese developed into Classical Chinese, which as a written idiom underwent few changes during the long span of time it was used. It was an artificial construct, which for different styles and occasions borrowed freely and heavily from any period of pre-Classical Chinese but in numerous cases without real understanding for the meaning and function of the words borrowed.
At the same time the spoken language changed continually, as did the conventions for pronouncing the written characters. Soon Classical Chinese made little sense when read aloud. It depended heavily on fixed word order and on rhythmical and parallel passages. It has sometimes been denied the status of a real language, but it was certainly one of the most successful means of communication in human history. It was the medium in which the poets Li Bai (701–762) and Du Fu (712–770) and the prose writer Han Yu (768–824) created some of the greatest masterpieces of all times and was the language of Neo-Confucianist philosophy (especially of Zhu Xi [1130–1200]), which was to influence the West deeply. Classical Chinese was also the language in which the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) wrote in his attempt to convert the Chinese empire to Christianity.
Post-Classical Chinese
Post-Classical Chinese, based on dialects very similar to the language now spoken in North China, probably owes its origin to the Buddhist storytelling tradition; the tales appeared in translations from Sanskrit during the Tang dynasty (618–907). During the Song dynasty (960–1279) this vernacular language was used by both Buddhists and Confucianists for polemic writings; it also appeared in indigenous Chinese novels based on popular storytelling. During and after the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368) the vernacular was used also in the theatre.
Modern Standard Chinese has a threefold origin: the written post-Classical language, the spoken standard of Imperial times (Mandarin), and the vernacular language of Beijing. These idioms were clearly related originally, and combining them for the purpose of creating a practical national language was a task that largely solved itself once the signal had been given. The term National Language (guoyu) had been borrowed from Japanese at the beginning of the 20th century, and, from 1915, various committees considered the practical implications of promoting it. The deciding event was the action of the May Fourth Movement of 1919; at the instigation of the liberal savant Hu Shi, Classical Chinese (also known as wenyan) was rejected as the standard written language. (Hu Shi also led the vernacular literature movement of 1917; his program for literary reform appeared on Jan. 1, 1917.) The new written idiom has gained ground faster in literature than in science, but there can be no doubt that the days of Classical Chinese as a living medium are numbered. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, some government regulation was applied successfully, and the tremendous task of making Modern Standard Chinese understood throughout China was effectively undertaken. In what must have been the largest-scale linguistic plan in history, untold millions of Chinese, whose mother tongues were divergent Mandarin or non-Mandarin languages or non-Chinese languages, learned to speak and understand the National Language, or Putonghua, a name it is now commonly called; with this effort, literacy was imparted to great numbers of people in all age groups.
The writing system
The Chinese writing system is non-alphabetic. It applies a specific character to write each meaningful syllable or each nonmeaningful syllabic that is part of a polysyllabic word.
Pre-Classical characters
When the Chinese script first appeared, as used for writing Oracular Chinese (from c. 1500 bc), it must already have undergone considerable development. Although many of the characters can be recognized as originally depicting some object, many are no longer recognizable. The characters did not indicate the object in a primitive nonlinguistic way but only represented a specific word of the Chinese language (e.g., a picture of the phallic altar to the earth is used only to write the word earth). It is therefore misleading to characterize the Chinese script as pictographic or ideographic; nor is it truly syllabic, for syllables that sound alike but have different meanings are written differently. Logographic (i.e., marked by a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word) is the term that best describes the nature of the Chinese writing system.
Verbs and nouns are written by what are or were formerly pictures, often consisting of several elements (e.g., the character for ‘to love’ depicts a woman and a child; the character for ‘beautiful’ is a picture of a man with a huge headdress with ram’s horns on top). The exact meaning of the word is rarely deducible from even a clearly recognizable picture, because the connotations are either too broad or too narrow for the word’s precise meaning. For example, the picture ‘relationship of mother to child’ includes more facets than ‘love,’ a concept that, of course, is not restricted to the mother-child relation, and a man adorned with ram’s horns undoubtedly had other functions than that of being handsome to look at, whereas the concept ‘beautiful’ is applicable also to men in other situations, as well as to women. Abstract nouns are indicated by means of concrete associations. The character for ‘peace, tranquility’ consists of a somewhat stylized form of the elements ‘roof,’ ‘heart,’ and ‘(wine) cup.’ Abstract symbols have been used to indicate numbers and local relationships.
Related words with similar pronunciations were usually written by one and the same character (the character for ‘to love, to consider someone good’ is a derivative of a similarly written word ‘to be good’). This gave rise to the most important invention in the development of the Chinese script—that of writing a word by means of another one with the same or similar pronunciation. A picture of a carpenter’s square was primarily used for writing ‘work, craftsman; to work’ and was pronounced kuŋ; secondarily it was used to write kuŋ- (the hyphen stands for an element that was perhaps s) ‘to present,’ guŋ ‘red,’ kuŋ ‘rainbow,’ and kruŋ ‘river.’ During the Archaic period this practice was developed to such a degree that too many words came to be written as one and the same character. In imitation of the characters that already consisted of several components an element was added for each meaning of a character to distinguish words from each other. Thus ‘red’ was no longer written with a single component but acquired an additional component that added the element ‘silk’ on the left; ‘river’ acquired an additional component of ‘water.’ The original part of the character is referred to as its phonetic and the added element as its radical.
