Ancient Chinese
Ancient Chinese is relative to modern Chinese. It is the mass language of the ancient Han people. In a broad sense, the written language of ancient Chinese has two systems: one is the ancient written Chinese language formed based on the spoken language of the Pre-Qin Dynasty and the works written by descendants in this written language, which is what we call classical Chinese; the other is the written language of ancient China in the north after the Six Dynasties. Dialects are based on the ancient vernacular. In the narrow sense, ancient Chinese written language refers to classical Chinese.
Period
Until now, there is no recognized and obvious dividing line between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese. Generally speaking, the "May 4th Movement"/"Vernacular Movement" is regarded as the watershed. Ancient Chinese can be subdivided into Archaic Chinese and Medieval Chinese.
Characters
There are six types of structure rules of Chinese characters, which are called "six books": pictograms, meanings, meanings, pictographs, annotations, and borrowings. In fact, there are only the first four methods of making Chinese characters, and the latter ones are just the method of using characters.
Font
The main characters used in the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties were oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, each prince developed his own writing style. It was not until the Qin Dynasty that the writing methods were unified, Xiaozhuan was used as the universal font, and official script was successively created to simplify the writing of Xiaozhuan.
In fact, due to the teacher-inheritance relationship in the development of Chinese characters, the actual writing is also different in different regions. Therefore, some ancient books, calligraphy and paintings use Chinese characters with different writing methods.
Grammar
Chinese originally did not have a so-called grammar, and only later generations came up with this concept through comparison. The grammar of ancient Chinese is mainly reflected in vocabulary usage and sentence structure.
Vocabulary use
Chinese does not have part-of-speech changes like Western pinyin scripts. She directly uses words with other parts of speech to conjugate them (this is just a modern concept, not to say that Chinese Ancient Chinese had these concepts). For example, noun verb, verb nominalization, verb adjectiveization, etc.
Sentence structure
Ancient Chinese used a large number of omitted sentence patterns, mainly such as subjects. Therefore, in a large number of sentences, the existence of the subject cannot be seen and can only be inferred from the meaning of the context. In addition, a very obvious usage is to advance the object in negative sentences. For example: "Time does not wait for me" is an idiom with a typical ancient Chinese structure, which puts the object "I" in front of "wai". There are still a lot of the same words and sentences, which is also very different from modern Chinese.
Phonology
Before the Zhou Dynasty, there was no unified phonology in China. As the national power of the Zhou Dynasty increased, the pronunciation of various places gradually became based on the dialect or accent of the capital, which was called Yayan. Erya was the first book in the Zhou Dynasty that classified words. "ER" means near/close. "Ya" means elegant language, which is the correct pronunciation.
Pinyin system
The pinyin system of early Chinese was "pronunciation like a certain character", that is, using characters with the same or similar pronunciation to mark the pronunciation of other characters.
Later, the Chinese pinyin system was called "Fanqie": two Chinese characters were combined phonetically, and the initial consonants of the former and the finals of the latter were pronounced together. With the changes of the times, the differences between ancient phonology and modern phonology are different.
Regions where it was adopted
Because China was at its peak of national power in ancient times, it influenced ethnic groups in neighboring areas to adopt or refer to Chinese and Chinese characters as their local pronunciation and writing.
In terms of writing, for example, during the Lee Dynasty of Korea, Chinese characters were directly used. Khitan originated from the Chinese characters Khitan small characters and Khitan large characters.
In terms of pronunciation, for example: the ancient Wu pronunciation remains in modern Japanese.
Modern Korean also retains some ancient pronunciation