Is classical Chinese spoken by the ancients?

1. What did the ancients say? The ancients said it was classical Chinese. Do you remember the sentence written by Chen Sheng in Historical Records? "Whew, does the swallow know the ambition of the swan?" Here's what Bobby Chen said when he was a civilian. The older it is, the harder it is for civilians to understand what they say. Mulan Ci is a folk song in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and Water Margin in the Three Kingdoms is the vernacular of the Ming Dynasty, which is similar to the current language. In fact, the classical Chinese we are talking about now is spoken by ancient people. Of course, written language and spoken language are slightly different, but the difference should not be great. Later, it was used in the article, but the spoken language changed a lot. By the Tang and Song Dynasties, the difference between classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese was quite great. Later, vernacular Chinese was used in some literary works. The widespread use of vernacular Chinese is in modern times. In fact, this local dialect still has the shadow of ancient people's speech. Take Xiamen dialect as an example, "Have you eaten?" Xiamen dialect only says "Have you eaten?" . "Is there?" Just say, "Is there?" If you ask in detail, "Is it true or false?" Xiamen said, "Is there any suppression?"

2. Did the ancients speak classical Chinese? The ancients spoke in a completely different way from us. If the ancients were resurrected, we would certainly not understand what they said. Now the southern dialect is closer to the ancient spoken language and retains a small number of ancient pronunciation methods, so the southern dialect is more difficult to understand, such as Wu dialect and Cantonese. Of course, there were dialects in ancient times.

There was also Mandarin in ancient times, which is the lingua franca equivalent to Mandarin now. It is a language that officials must learn in order to facilitate administrative communication, so it is called Putonghua. If ordinary people have a wide range of activities, they should also use Mandarin to facilitate communication. Of course, we don't understand Mandarin.

As far as written language is concerned, the classical Chinese you speak is a unified written language in ancient times and used by ancient literati. What you may say is that many folk people can't read and write, and literate people record according to their spoken meaning. Let me remind you that ancient historians do not collect history by the people, but only select materials from ancient books. The people you mentioned who are engaged in collecting folk languages may be poetry officials, that is, officials sent by the rulers to collect folk poems. The Book of Songs was written by these poets, and it was basically written in folk natural language, but the possibility of literary processing was not ruled out.

In short, to put it simply, written Mandarin is classical Chinese. In ancient times, there were also works written without Mandarin, such as Biography of Flowers on the Sea written in Wu language.

3. Did you speak classical Chinese in ancient times? Classical Chinese is actually the written language of ancient China, and their spoken language is more lively.

Just as there is a difference between written Chinese and spoken Chinese, with the development of Chinese, the difference between written Chinese and spoken Chinese is not so great. The written language of ancient Chinese, that is, the classical Chinese spoken now, is so different from people's daily spoken language that ordinary people (uneducated people) can't understand it, so modern times will advocate vernacular Chinese.

Mandarin, Wu language, etc. In fact, it is equivalent to Mandarin and dialects today, regardless of whether the classical Chinese is written or spoken. The tone of ancient Chinese is indeed different from that of modern Chinese, with five tones, but this is only a phonetic problem of Chinese. You can look at Mr. Wang Li's History of Ancient Chinese.

4. Did ancient people say that classical Chinese is actually easier to understand than classical Chinese? If modern people really travel to ancient times, they can't communicate without a little knowledge of Chinese. The modern Chinese we speak now is mixed with a lot of foreign words, especially those from English and Japanese, which have been completely integrated into our lives. You can't tell if you don't pay attention, such as English loanword engine radar. Fu Qiang Guitar Japanese loanwords Comics Economic Science Business Cadres Perhaps you will ask why there are so many Japanese loanwords, because many great men in China's early days lived in Japan, such as Sun Yat-sen, Lu Xun, Chen Duxiu, etc., and ancient Chinese was completely written by the Han people themselves, which is different from modern Chinese.