History of the Chinese language

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "History of the Chinese language" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. (October 2023) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Chinese. (October 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Chinese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 286 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Chinese Wikipedia article at [[:zh:漢語史]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|zh|漢語史}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The earliest

800km
500miles

Origin

  

One hypothetical scenario for the homeland and spread of Proto-Sino-Tibetan speakers between 3250 and 1600 BCE, based on a 2019 database of comparative linguistic data developed by Laurent Sagart et al.^[5]

Determining that relationship and reconstructing Proto-Sino-Tibetan is challenging. Although there is good documentation that allows for the reconstruction of the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the point where Chinese split from the rest of the Sino-Tibetan languages. This is a common problem in historical linguistics, where the comparative method is used to deduce these changes. This technique has not yet yielded results for Sino-Tibetan languages, likely due to poor documentation of many Sino-Tibetan languages.^{[citation needed]} Therefore, despite their affinity, the common ancestry of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages remains an unproven hypothesis.^[6]

Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978) in the early 20th century. The system was much revised, but always heavily relied on Karlgren's insights and methods.^{[citation needed]}

Pre-Classical period (1300–500 BCE)

Another common sound change occurred between voiced and voiceless initials, though the phonemic voicing distinction has disappeared in most modern varieties. This is believed to reflect an Old Chinese de-transitivising prefix, but scholars disagree on whether the voiced or voiceless form reflects the original root. Each pair of examples below reflects two words of opposite transitivity.^{[citation needed]}

Eastern Han period (1–300 CE)

Middle Chinese (300–1100)

Middle Chinese was a form of Chinese used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties between the 4th and 10th centuries. It can be divided into two periods: Early Middle Chinese is documented in the Qieyun (601), the first rime dictionary, and a later revision in the Guangyun (1008). Late Middle Chinese is reflected by rime tables such as the Yunjing. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rime dictionaries, foreign transliterations, rime tables constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words.

Early Modern Chinese (1100–1900)

The development of Chinese has been complex. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is due in part to the open plains of northern China, in contrast to the mountains and rivers of southern China that enabled greater linguistic diversity.^{[citation needed]} Moreover, Mandarin, called Guanhua ('officials' speech') was at first based on the Nanjing dialect, and became the dominant vernacular in northern China during the early Qing. It was gradually challenged by the variety used by scholar-officials of Beijing. In the 17th century, the Qing began setting up orthoepy academies to conform pronunciation to the Beijing standard, but had little success.^{[citation needed]}

Modern Chinese (1900 – present)

During the late 19th century, the Beijing dialect finally replaced the Nanjing dialect in the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China continued to use their local varieties for most aspects of life. The area where the new Beijing court dialect was used was thus fairly limited.^{[citation needed]}

This situation changed with the creation of an elementary school education system committed to teaching

Besides the standard writing systems promoted by the government, no other written form of Chinese has seen widespread use to an extent comparable to that of Standard Chinese.[17]

Notes

References

Citations