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Grammar

Main article: Classical Chinese grammar

Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, wherein the significance of words—and consequently the meaning of phrases and sentences—is almost exclusively determined by elements of syntax, such as the order in which words appear. This distinguishes Classical Chinese from other literary languages like Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, and Ancient Greek, where grammar is based instead on inflections like affixes and conjugations that vary the form of words to indicate their function. Each written character is a single syllable in length, and almost always corresponds to a single independent word. Most characters impart little grammatical information in isolation and may function as one of several different word classes depending on context, though some are more limited in their possible meanings than others. Words written with the same character can either be cognate, such as 王 possibly denoting either a noun meaning 'king' or a verb meaning 'to rule'—or the result of orthographic borrowing or variation, such as 女 possibly denoting either a noun meaning 'woman' or a second-person personal pronoun 'you'. These different senses may have the same or distinct pronunciations. While the language is often described as including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions, there is no firm consensus among linguists as to what word classes can be defined in Classical Chinese, if any. As a result, the intended meaning of some passages may be ambiguous or obscure, and may or may not be discerned with a broad understanding of context and the possible subtleties of each word.

The most basic and longest-standing distinction can be made between function words (虚字; 虛字; xūzì) and content words (实字; 實字; shízì).

Reference and exposure

Classical Chinese can be described as a pro-drop language, as its syntax often allows either subjects or objects to be dropped when the reference is understood. There are more pronouns compared to the modern vernacular—many of which are used as part of a system of honorifics. Classical Chinese also tends to use its pronouns less frequently, opting instead to drop the subject or object of a sentence entirely—contributing to a greater potential ambiguity as to who is acting upon whom in a given passage. Many final and interrogative particles are found in Classical Chinese. There is no copula: 是 (shì), which serves this function in modern Standard Chinese, is a near demonstrative ('this') in Classical Chinese.

Lexicon

Main article: Classical Chinese lexicon

Style and theory

Literary Chinese writing is distinctly terse and compact in its style. There is a general emphasis on maintaining parallelism and rhythm, even in prose. Additionally, certain rhetorical devices have been identified as of compared to that of other traditions.

Words that are multiple characters in length appear much more rarely than in written vernacular Chinese. While modern analysis of Literary Chinese often employs the concept of "words", such a concept was first clearly articulated by Chinese authors in the 5th century, in commentaries on the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit. While written characters were always discretized and always correspond one-to-one with monosyllabic morphemes, abstract segments of language like 辞 (cí), 言 (yán), and 文 (wén) are not consistently defined from text to text, as they are for modern Chinese writers. There was a common preoccupation during the Classical period with names (名; míng); from the Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 CE) onward, there was also a clear notion of characters (字; zì).

Philosophical schools like the Mohists did not conceive of a system of formal logic constructed outside of the existing written language. Notably, syllogisms—deductive arguments using two propositions assumed to be true to prove a conclusion, the use of which were fundamental in classical Hellenistic and Indian philosophy—are almost totally absent from premodern Chinese writing.

Reading systems

Main article: Literary and colloquial readings

Further information: Old Chinese phonology and Middle Chinese

Chinese characters do not directly reflect the sounds of speech, and generally do not change to reflect later sound changes in the words they represent. Efforts to reconstruct Old Chinese pronunciation began relatively recently. Literary Chinese is not read with a reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation; instead, it is read with the pronunciations as categorized and listed in a rime dictionary originally based upon the Middle Chinese pronunciation in Luoyang between the 2nd and 4th centuries. Over time, each dynasty updated and modified the official rime dictionary: by the time of the Yuan and Ming dynasties, its phonology reflected that of early Mandarin. As the imperial examination system required the candidate to compose poetry in the shi genre, pronunciation in non-Mandarin speaking parts of China such as Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian is either based on everyday speech, such as in Standard Cantonese, or is based on a special set of pronunciations borrowed from Classical Chinese, such as in Southern Min. In practice, all varieties of Chinese combine the two extremes of pronunciation: that according to a prescribed system, versus that based on everyday speech. Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, also have words that are pronounced one way in colloquial usage and another way when used in Literary Chinese or in specialized terms coming from Literary Chinese, though the system is not as extensive as that of Min or Wu.

Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese readers of Literary Chinese each use distinct systems of pronunciation specific to their own languages.

Qieyun

Main article: Qieyun

As pronunciation in modern varieties is different from Old Chinese as well as other historical forms such as Middle Chinese, characters that once rhymed may not any longer, or vice versa. Poetry and other rhyme-based writing thus becomes less coherent than the original reading must have been. However, some modern Chinese varieties have certain phonological characteristics that are closer to the older pronunciations than others, as shown by the preservation of certain rhyme structures.

• Brushtalk

Japanese kanbun

Main article: Kanbun

Kanbun is a system for reading Literary Chinese invented by Japanese speakers following the introduction of writing to the country. Its scope eventually grew to encompass a literary style where the Japanese language itself was written with Chinese characters. Until the 20th century, much Japanese literature was written using kanbun. Japanese and Chinese are from different language families, and differ considerably in their grammar and syntax. For example, Chinese generally uses subject–verb–object word order (SVO), while Japanese uses subject–object–verb word order (SOV). Kanbun included annotations to aid the reader, such as kaeriten 'return markers', which indicated how to successfully read Literary texts using an SOV word order.

Romanizations

Romanizations have been devised to provide distinct spellings for Literary Chinese words, together with pronunciation rules for various modern varieties. The earliest was the Romanisation Interdialectique by French missionaries Henri Lamasse of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and Ernest Jasmin, based on Middle Chinese, followed by linguist Wang Li's Wényán luómǎzì based on Old Chinese in 1940, and then by Chao's General Chinese romanization in 1975. However, none of these systems have seen extensive use.

文章

Category:Classical Chinese

• Classical Chinese lexicon
• Classical Chinese grammar
• Chinese classics
• Old Chinese
• History of the Chinese language

據

• Barnes, A. C.; Starr, Don; Ormerod, Graham (2009). Du's Handbook of Classical Chinese Grammar. York: Alcuin. ISBN 978-1-904-62374-8.
• Branner, David Prager (2006). "Some composite phonological systems in Chinese". In Branner, David Prager (ed.). The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Vol. 271. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 978-9-027-24785-8.
• Chen, Ping (1999). Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64572-0.
• Fraser, Chris (2007). "Language and Ontology in Early Chinese Thought". Philosophy East and West. 57 (4): 420–456. doi:10.1353/pew.2007.0045. ISSN 1529-1898.
• Geaney, Jane (2022). The Emergence of Word-meaning in Early China: A Grammatology. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-438-48895-0.
• Gunn, Edward M. (1991). Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-804-7-1599-7.
• Rouzer, Paul F. (2007). A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02269-0.
• Willman, Marshall D. (2022) [2016]. "Logic and Language in Early Chinese Philosophy". In Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri (eds.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

字書

• Xu Shen (許慎) (c. 100), Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字 (in Literary Chinese) – via the Chinese Text Project
• Duan Yucai (段玉裁) (1815), Shuowen Jiezi Zhu 說文解字注 (in Literary Chinese) – via the Chinese Text Project