How did the pronunciation of ancient Chinese become like this?

Ancient Chinese suddenly became modern Chinese. Before the Han Dynasty, written language and spoken language were consistent, and all the ancient books we saw before the Han Dynasty were spoken by people at that time. Later, the spoken language slowly developed and changed, but the written language remained basically unchanged, which caused the disconnection between the written language and the spoken language.

Probably in the Song Dynasty, spoken language was close to the present language, and literary works based on spoken language appeared among the people, among which the outstanding representatives were scripts and parody. In fact, there were still some gaps between spoken Chinese and modern Chinese at that time, but the gap was not big.

Articles written by literati, official documents of the court, or classical Chinese. This serious disconnect between spoken and written language lasted until the early Republic of China. Until the May 4th Movement broke out, the New Culture Movement advocated that everyone should write vernacular Chinese and give up classical Chinese.

Extended data:

Language has developed for thousands of years, but the written language has hardly changed, which is a miracle in the history of human language. This happens only in China where Chinese characters are used. Because Chinese characters are ideographic, pronunciation has nothing to do with meaning.

So the pronunciation has changed, the meaning has changed, and the font can remain the same. Therefore, Chinese characters are a great invention of our ancestors. Because of the characteristics of Chinese characters, we can understand the articles written by our ancestors thousands of years ago, inherit the culture of our ancestors, and become the only country among the four ancient civilizations that has survived to this day, benefiting the world with its great culture.

Methods of learning ancient phonetic language;

1, text transfer method: This method needs to learn classical Chinese well, and semantic transfer can be carried out when appropriate.

2. Causal test: Inferring the meaning of words in classical Chinese through common sense or learned knowledge. If you can't conform to common sense and reason, you should consider whether there is cheating.

3. Context inference method: it is common to see whether the content words in classical Chinese conform to the context and disagree with the content words.

4. Grammatical reasoning: with the help of ancient Chinese grammar knowledge, analyze the meaning of special notional words. For details of ancient Chinese grammar, please refer to Gao Benhan's Synopsis of Ancient Chinese Grammar.

5. Intertextuality: Synonymous correspondence and antonym correspondence have the same sentence structure, which can be inferred by comparing contexts.