- Also called:
- Sinitic languages
- Chinese:
- Han
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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.