The development history of Chinese tells us that the written language of pre-Qin literature is basically the same as the spoken language at that time, so although the Analects is difficult to understand now, it was spoken at that time, because it is a quotation itself, so it is impossible to use too many written languages. In fact, at that time, written language and spoken language were not really separated, and people were not aware of written language.
Why did the distinction between written language and spoken language appear later? The key lies in the worship of articles in the pre-Qin period by later generations. Because of this worship, people after Qin and Han dynasties imitated the pre-Qin language and style in words. However, in real life, great changes have taken place in spoken English, and there are many changes in vocabulary and grammar, but the familiar surface has been deliberately maintained and has not changed much.
Of course, the ancients did not imitate the pre-Qin Chinese at home. They can only imitate some fixed idioms, such as "nothing", "what", "what" and "what", but they often give clues in some subtle words, which is the basis for us to study the differences of written Chinese in different times.
For example, an article written by Yugong in Shangshu was written by Yu Xia on the surface, but the vocabulary in it was completely the language characteristics of the Warring States period, so we concluded that it was forged.
On the other hand, intellectuals are increasingly becoming the pillars of society, and education in ancient China was not popular. Therefore, in order to show their status, scholars prefer to write unfamiliar and incomprehensible articles, and gradually break away from the spoken language at that time.
This phenomenon didn't stop until the New Culture Movement in the 20th century.
But at the same time, we should also pay attention to the fact that vernacular literature did not stop because of the difficulty of understanding ancient Chinese, and it was manifested from the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Taking Zhang Hui's novels in Ming and Qing Dynasties as an example, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms was conservative from the beginning, and it was plain classical Chinese instead of vernacular Chinese. The Water Margin was written in vernacular from the beginning. These vernacular works reflect the spoken language at that time and are unique.
Bai Juyi's poems can be understood by an old woman, but they are by no means plain vernacular, otherwise they can't be called poems. Poetry needs the artistic processing of poets. Rich rhetoric and vivid images are essential elements of poetry. Bai Juyi's poetic language can be understood by an old woman, but it can't be completely vernacular.
Huang Zunxian, a famous modern poet in China, pays attention to my words, my mouth and simple form, which can be said to be Bai Juyi's second.
Vernacular literature can refer to Hu Shi's History of Vernacular Literature.
The changes of spoken English now
In fact, from the above discussion, you may have found that the change of spoken language is difficult to be controlled artificially, so theoretically, since spoken language is a popular language, it is impossible to be influenced by too many scholars, so his changes should be relatively great, and the ancient prose of past dynasties is actually produced by the literati's deliberate pursuit of similarity with the pre-Qin vernacular, so Han Yu's language is very similar to the pre-Qin language (although we can find Han Yu's loopholes in subtleties).
The biggest change in spoken English is pronunciation. Even if we can go back to the era of Confucius now, we will certainly not understand a word that Confucius and his disciples said during their lectures, because the pronunciation of ancient Chinese is too different from now.
In the Tang and Song Dynasties, the pronunciation of spoken English was very similar to that of Cantonese and Minnan, so the pronunciation of Japanese and Cantonese always matched (of course, Japanese is also developing).
In terms of vocabulary, meaningful changes and the emergence of new words.
For example, stopping at Fenglin in the middle of the night meant sitting near, but not in ancient times.
Grammatical changes are minimal, and some grammatical features of ancient Chinese have been preserved by idioms, such as prepositional objects. What we are talking about now is that only people follow the trend and only people ask questions, which is how it is formed.
The following are the relevant contents in our notes of modern Chinese class:
2.2. 1. Concepts and definitions of modern Chinese
(1) Different opinions on the stages of ancient Chinese and modern Chinese: May 4th Movement, Opium War, novels in the late Qing Dynasty.
② The meaning of modern Chinese:
Broadly speaking, it includes Mandarin and various dialects.
Narrow sense: especially Putonghua.
(3) How did Putonghua come into being-two ways to form * * * homophones:
A. Naturally occurring, not mandatory:
The influence of Shanghainese and Cantonese on Putonghua is unconscious and natural.
B. Forced formation, artificial norms:
Popularize and standardize on the basis of natural formation.
(4) the expression of homophones:
A. Written language B. Spoken language
The speed and process of their formation are different. Mandarin has written language and spoken language, which have their own different formation processes.
2.2.2. The formation of modern China vernacular.
Vernacular is also the written language of Hanzhong.
(1) Ancient Chinese:
Oracle Bone Inscriptions proved that more than 3,000 years ago was similar to the present.
In the Qin and Han Dynasties, there appeared a cross-regional language-Yayan, which was the language around Luoyang at that time, that is, Xia Yan.
Written language reflects different oral situations. The "wind" in The Book of Songs faithfully records spoken language, with the color of folk spoken language. The Analects of Confucius recorded Confucius' spoken language, reflecting the spoken language at that time, but in fact, people in the pre-Qin period did say so, and it must be spoken language.
(2) The vernacular Chinese in the process of separation between vernacular Chinese and vernacular Chinese:
After the Han and Wei Dynasties, spoken English changed. At that time, the literati deliberately imitated the expression of pre-Qin, forming a classical Chinese that was far from spoken language. The formation of classical Chinese made written language divorced from spoken language, and classical Chinese also occupied the dominant position of written language for thousands of years.
Compared with the written language of classical Chinese, it is the written language of vernacular Chinese. Shi Shuo Xin Yu in the Southern Dynasties left many traces of spoken language at that time, and there were also many spoken words and sentences. During the translation of Buddhist scriptures in the Six Dynasties, it is necessary to speak vernacular to the common people. Bianwen appeared after the Tang and Five Dynasties and belongs to a kind of rap literature. Ancient Buddhist Zen works, such as "Zen Quotations" and "Zutang Collection", are used to tell Buddhist stories in temples. Low level of education and heavy traces of vernacular Chinese. In Song Dynasty, Neo-Confucianism prevailed, and The Quotations of Zhu was very close to spoken language. At the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, the vernacular prevailed, and the scripts (storytelling scripts) at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty were mostly written in vernacular, while many spoken languages were preserved in miscellaneous songs. Novels in the late Yuan Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty are not classical Chinese, but ancient vernacular. Although with local color, they are all written in northern dialects, and there is a trend of taking northern spoken language as written language. The written language of the same language is becoming more and more perfect, and the vernacular is basically formed.
③ Modern "Vernacular Movement":
During the May 4th Movement, Chen Duxiu's New Youth issued a slogan: abolish classical Chinese and advocate vernacular Chinese. The earliest published books are Vernacular Chinese, Diary of a Madman, Mourning for the Past, etc. , is for the "vernacular movement".
1920, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China ordered schools to stop using classical Chinese textbooks, and vernacular Chinese finally took the leading position as a literary language (national orthodox written language), replacing classical Chinese.
2.2.3. The formation of modern spoken Chinese
It is difficult to determine the specific age of the formation of spoken homonyms, but it must be later than written words.
In the history of Chinese, northern dialects are dominant in spoken homophones.
Sylvia:
During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, people's words were illogical, so Confucius had to use * * * in his lectures.
(2) Common language:
Yang Xiong's Dialect in the Western Han Dynasty recorded the spoken language and dialects in the Zhou and Han Dynasties, and also recorded a kind of "common language", indicating that there was a bud of spoken language at that time.
(3) The role of Beijing dialect in the formation of spoken homophones;
In the process of the formation of spoken homonyms, northern dialects have always dominated, especially since 1 153 Jinding made Beijing its capital, Beijing dialect has gradually become the most influential spoken language.
According to the phonology of the Central Plains, Beijing dialect was spoken in ancient times, and the voice of the Central Plains was "a common language in the world".
At the end of Yuan Dynasty, two books, Lao Zuo Da and Plop, were textbooks for teaching foreigners Chinese in Beijing dialect.
Beijing dialect quickly gained the status of Putonghua. Mandarin is not necessarily used only by officials. The imperial examinations in the Ming Dynasty stipulated that everyone should speak Mandarin.
The infiltration of Beijing dialect into the southern dialect is manifested in the following aspects: the southern dialect has two pronunciations, namely, writing two pronunciations, writing two pronunciations, white reading refers to the local dialect, and literary reading refers to Beijing dialect. For example, the word "big" in "adult" in Shanghai dialect is read in vain, while the word "big" in "university" is read in vain.
(4) the popularity of Mandarin in Qing Dynasty:
The Qing army went south and brought Mandarin to the south. Formed a "Mandarin Island" in Nanping, Fujian.
Yongzheng ordered in 1728 that officials must master Mandarin. Yongzheng founded Yinzheng Academy in Fujian and Guangdong. Mandarin mixed with dialects is called "Lan Qing Mandarin".
(5) In the late Qing Dynasty, there was an urgent need for text reform, unified spoken language, and consistent spoken and written language. Some people began to engage in pinyin.
(6) The "Mandarin Movement" in the Republic of China:
During the Republic of China, Cai Yuanpei promulgated Phonetic Alphabet to test the pronunciation. At that time, there was a debate about whether to adopt Beijing accent or national accent (Shanghai dialect). Wu dialect retains the entering tone and voiced initials of ancient Chinese, but if Beijing accent is adopted, it will abandon the essence of ancient Chinese.
Phonetic symbols, authorized pronunciation, the debate of national sounds and the promotion of Beijing dialect are called "Mandarin Movement" in history.
The "Vernacular Movement" and "Mandarin Movement" formed Mandarin, which is called "Mandarin" in Taiwan Province Province and "Mandarin" in Singapore.
The second question:
Not all ancient books have no punctuation marks. Punctuation didn't appear in ancient books before the Song Dynasty until after the Song Dynasty. When people in Song Dynasty were reading, they drew a circle at the end of the sentence, which was called a sentence, and drew a dot in the sentence, which was called reading funny. Sometimes there are only unread sentences left.
Even so, although ancient people read sentences, they seldom read them. People basically break sentences by their own sense of language when reading.
People who study often read and break until they can fully understand the article, so the ancients attached great importance to the training of reading sentences. Book of rites? In Xue Ji, there is a saying that "one year is distinguished by the classics". Zheng Xuan's Note: "If you leave the classics, you can't break the sentence." That is, interrupting sentences from ancient books. It can be seen that sentence breaking is the first step of ancient enlightenment education.
There is no need for readers to add passages from ancient Chinese. When the book is printed, it is already a semicolon paragraph, and the vertical version of the book is only a paragraph on the right.
Some ancient annotation books we see now, that is, ancient annotations of ancient books, are basically annotated with sentences. When annotating a book, the annotator naturally annotates it according to the sentence read, so we can now understand the ancient sentence-breaking method through the ancient annotation book.
Because there are still a few books read by the ancients, the punctuation marks of ancient books (especially punctuation marks other than periods and commas) are basically added after the May 4th Movement. "Five? During the Fourth New Culture Movement, some scholars advocated new punctuation marks and used them to punctuate ancient books. Punctuation is used in sentence reading now. 195 1 year, the General Administration of Publishing of the Central People's Government published Usage of Punctuation, which has fourteen kinds of * * *, that is, full stop (. ), semicolon (; ), comma (,), pause (,), colon (:), question mark (? ), exclamation point (! ), quotation marks (""), brackets (), ellipsis (...), dash (-), bullet (? Under the word), the title (? ), proper nouns (-added under the word), and an interval (. B) in the word. The first eight are collectively referred to as dot numbers, and the last six are collectively referred to as labels with interval numbers. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the state has attached great importance to the collation of ancient books, and important ancient books, including medical works, have been published in punctuation. However, compared with the vast number of ancient books, including ancient medical books, punctuated or punctuated ancient books still account for only a small proportion. However, it is not easy to break sentences and punctuation, among which the good and the bad are mixed, and the broken sentences and punctuation in ancient Chinese medicine books are worse than others.
There are so many ancient books in China that it is impossible for all the books to be punctuated by professionals. Therefore, if you read an ancient book without punctuation, you should punctuate it yourself.
For ordinary readers, how to break sentences is introduced in detail in our textbooks, which you can find in major bookstores.
Published by Peking University Publishing House
Guo Xiliang, Jiang and other editors
The cover of this book is blue.
The knowledge about reading sentences is in the second volume.