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In their research on Chinese, western linguists make two major mistakes:
According to Chinese history or legend, the first Chinese characters were invented by Cang Jie on the orders of the founding Chinese Emperor Yanhuang (the Yellow Emperor). The earliest examples we have found for written Chinese are the oracle bones, written on ox shoulder blades and turtle carapaces, which were largely used to divine the future for local Chinese rulers during the Shang dynasty, which was about 2200 BCE.
The most dramatic development of the Chinese writing system occurred during the Zhou dynasty (1045-256 BCE). At this time, Chinese tribes had evolved into kingdoms, mostly living along the major waterways of China. As they came to know of each other, they began to form alliances. The business of forming alliances required a way of communication or written language so that their rulers could communicate with each other before paper had been invented.
One thing which is very interesting about early Chinese culture is how advanced the early Chinese were when it came to metallurgy. When it came to casting bronze, the Chinese of the period were the most advanced people in the world. The early Chinese merged their early writing system with their bronze casting capability to create what has become known to archeologists as Ding (vessel). What is particularly interesting about the Chinese use of the ding is that many of them featured Chinese writing, and we can even document the development of new characters which were cast on the ding.
So what did the ding do? They were contracts between tribes and kingdoms which were cast into bronze! For practical purposes, they were official treaties and became an important part of early Han Chinese court ceremony. They provide us with documentation into the evolution of written Chinese.
Here is the picture of the evolution of the Chinese language we get from this history:
Eventually written Chinese coalesced into written classical Chinese, which was very short and almost telegraphic in its brevity. At the same time though, spoken dialects or languages were used by most people. Often, the bridge between the spoken and written languages were huge. Through it all, the one thing which held the Han Chinese together were the written language.
In the second century BCE, China was united into one single dynasty state under the Qin dynasty. Shihuangdi, the founding emperor, ordered the unification of written Chinese into only one form, and standardization of the vocabulary. He also ordered the destruction of histories before the Qin dynasty.
Although the Qin dynasty lasted less than 20 years, following dynasties worked on the development of rhyme dictionaries and encyclopedias to develop a court or official Chinese 官话. All of this was done without abandoning written Chinese characters. In the early 20th century, this culminated in the 白话运动 following the May 4th movement in 1919. Now, written Chinese and spoken Chinese are fairly close to each other.
When it comes to morphemes, classical Chinese usually uses monosyllabic morphemes while most of the spoken languages use polysyllabic morphemes. Modern written Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect which uses polysyllabic morphemes. This is also true of Cantonese and other Chinese dialects. For readers of Mandarin Chinese, written colloquial Cantonese looks very different from Mandarin.
My theory as to why spoken Chinese has polysyllabic morphemes while classical Chinese uses monosyllabic morphemes is that since most of the Chinese languages have a limited number of phonemes with many characters sharing the same sounds, the spoken language needs polysyllabic units to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. In the written form, since the reader knows what character he is reading, there is no room for ambiguity and misunderstanding.
Further reading:
Paul Denlinger's answer to Why was China able to abolish the hereditary nobility and establish the absolute authority of the emperor and the dynasty around 200 BCE (when it was first unified), while Europe was never able to do so?
- They divide Chinese into the written and spoken languages, without thinking that both influenced each other and;
- They think of tone as somehow being a tack-on to the language since most other non Sino-Tibetan language families don't have tone. This overlooks the fact that all Sino-Tibetan languages feature tone in one form or another.
According to Chinese history or legend, the first Chinese characters were invented by Cang Jie on the orders of the founding Chinese Emperor Yanhuang (the Yellow Emperor). The earliest examples we have found for written Chinese are the oracle bones, written on ox shoulder blades and turtle carapaces, which were largely used to divine the future for local Chinese rulers during the Shang dynasty, which was about 2200 BCE.
The most dramatic development of the Chinese writing system occurred during the Zhou dynasty (1045-256 BCE). At this time, Chinese tribes had evolved into kingdoms, mostly living along the major waterways of China. As they came to know of each other, they began to form alliances. The business of forming alliances required a way of communication or written language so that their rulers could communicate with each other before paper had been invented.
One thing which is very interesting about early Chinese culture is how advanced the early Chinese were when it came to metallurgy. When it came to casting bronze, the Chinese of the period were the most advanced people in the world. The early Chinese merged their early writing system with their bronze casting capability to create what has become known to archeologists as Ding (vessel). What is particularly interesting about the Chinese use of the ding is that many of them featured Chinese writing, and we can even document the development of new characters which were cast on the ding.
So what did the ding do? They were contracts between tribes and kingdoms which were cast into bronze! For practical purposes, they were official treaties and became an important part of early Han Chinese court ceremony. They provide us with documentation into the evolution of written Chinese.
Here is the picture of the evolution of the Chinese language we get from this history:
- The early Chinese probably shared some early Han or Huaxia culture, but they also may have lived with non-Han tribes;
- Over a period of about 1,000 years from 2,000 to 1,000 BCE, these tribes evolved into kingdoms. The earliest Chinese chose their rulers (as many tribal societies still do), but gradually the Chinese evolved towards hereditary rule and developing their own nobilities.
- As these tribes became kingdoms, they reached out to each other, became aware of each other, and a need for diplomacy arose. They needed a written writing system to communicate with each other.
- All of these kingdoms adopted and embraced the written Chinese system for communications during the Zhou dynasty using the ding as the written form for their alliances. When they needed new characters, they invented new characters. We can assume that there was some similarity between their spoken and written forms, but there were variations of the written language with different characters until the Qin unification in the 2nd century BCE.
- Looking at the spread and development of Han Chinese culture, written Chinese was the "gateway drug" for the spread of Chinese culture. It was widely used by Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and also by marauding kingdoms on China's northern and western borders. A command of written Chinese was a determinant of whether a group of people were barbarians or civilized.
Eventually written Chinese coalesced into written classical Chinese, which was very short and almost telegraphic in its brevity. At the same time though, spoken dialects or languages were used by most people. Often, the bridge between the spoken and written languages were huge. Through it all, the one thing which held the Han Chinese together were the written language.
In the second century BCE, China was united into one single dynasty state under the Qin dynasty. Shihuangdi, the founding emperor, ordered the unification of written Chinese into only one form, and standardization of the vocabulary. He also ordered the destruction of histories before the Qin dynasty.
Although the Qin dynasty lasted less than 20 years, following dynasties worked on the development of rhyme dictionaries and encyclopedias to develop a court or official Chinese 官话. All of this was done without abandoning written Chinese characters. In the early 20th century, this culminated in the 白话运动 following the May 4th movement in 1919. Now, written Chinese and spoken Chinese are fairly close to each other.
When it comes to morphemes, classical Chinese usually uses monosyllabic morphemes while most of the spoken languages use polysyllabic morphemes. Modern written Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect which uses polysyllabic morphemes. This is also true of Cantonese and other Chinese dialects. For readers of Mandarin Chinese, written colloquial Cantonese looks very different from Mandarin.
My theory as to why spoken Chinese has polysyllabic morphemes while classical Chinese uses monosyllabic morphemes is that since most of the Chinese languages have a limited number of phonemes with many characters sharing the same sounds, the spoken language needs polysyllabic units to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. In the written form, since the reader knows what character he is reading, there is no room for ambiguity and misunderstanding.
Further reading:
Paul Denlinger's answer to Why was China able to abolish the hereditary nobility and establish the absolute authority of the emperor and the dynasty around 200 BCE (when it was first unified), while Europe was never able to do so?
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