period
Until now, there is no clearly recognized dividing line between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese. Generally speaking, the May 4th/Vernacular Movement is a watershed.
There are three obvious stages in the development of ancient Chinese: ancient Chinese with the pre-Qin period as the core, its phonetic system is generally called archaic sound, which is inferred from the ancient rhyme and pictophonetic characters in the Book of Songs, and its characters include Oracle Bone Inscriptions, bronze inscriptions and seal script; The phonetic system of Middle Ancient Chinese, with the Tang and Song Dynasties as the core, is generally called Middle Ancient Phonology, which is recorded by rhyme and rhyme, and the characters are regular script; Modern Chinese with late Ming and early Qing as the core. Others are divided into four stages: pre-Qin, Han, Wei and Six Dynasties, Tang and Song Dynasties, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. The most obvious difference between different stages of ancient Chinese is pronunciation, and ancient Chinese and characters are also different from later generations. The face of ancient Chinese in a narrow sense is basically the same as that of middle Chinese, because this is the most prosperous, influential and representative period of ancient Chinese.
trait
Chinese characters record words by recording morphemes and syllables, which are called "syllable morphemes". It means that a character symbol records syllables and morphemes with independent meanings.
Under the guidance of Liu Xin, Xu Shen in the Han Dynasty divided the structure and usage of Chinese characters into six kinds, which were called "six books": pictographic characters, indicative characters, knowing characters, pictographic characters, phonetic symbols, and loanwords. The first four are the rules of word formation, and the last two are the rules of word use.
Point to something. Those who refer to things can see and know, observe and see, and go up and down. Second, hieroglyphics. Pictographic characters, painted as objects, follow the body, the sun and the moon are also. Three voices. Voice, in the name of things, examples complement each other, rivers and rivers also. The fourth is to know. People who know are more suitable to see the meaning than class? So is Wu Xin. Fifth, divert attention. Those who transfer notes and build classes agree to accept each other and keep taking exams. Six words are borrowed. Under the guise of people, there is not a word, relying on voices to seek things, and the commander-in-chief is also. "
deficient
The deficiency of "Liu Shu" is that in early Chinese characters, a morpheme was recorded by a character symbol, and words were created according to the theory of "meaning is born by meaning, meaning is formed by meaning", that is, according to the meaning of morpheme, the intention was established, and finally a glyph was formed, which is a pictograph.
script
The main characters used in Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties were Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jinwen. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, various governors developed their own style of writing. It was not until the Qin Dynasty that the writing style of the characters was unified, and the official script unintentionally created by many Qin craftsmen during the Warring States period was standardized as a simplified Chinese character of Xiao Zhuan.
In fact, due to the relationship between teachers and students in the development of Chinese characters, the actual writing in different regions is different. Therefore, some ancient books and calligraphy and painting use Chinese characters with different writing methods.
grammar
The grammar of ancient Chinese is mainly reflected in the use of vocabulary and sentence structure.
Vocabulary use
The part of speech in Chinese hasn't changed, and she uses other parts of speech flexibly (this is only in terms of modern concepts, not to say that China ancient Chinese has these concepts). Such as noun usage, verb nominalization, verb adjectives and so on.
sentence structure
A large number of ellipsis sentences tend to omit the subject, so a large number of sentences can't see the existence of the subject and can only be inferred by the meaning of the context. Modern Chinese has largely retained this habit, especially spoken English.
In the negative sentence, prepositional object. For example, "time is not me and" is a typical idiom in the structure of ancient Chinese, and the object "I" comes before "he". This usage has completely disappeared in modern Chinese, Putonghua and various dialects.
Rhythm and rhythm
Before the Zhou Dynasty, there was no unified phonology in China. With the increasing national strength of the Zhou Dynasty, the phonology of various places gradually took the accent of the capital as the standard, which was called Yayan. Erya is the first book in the Zhou Dynasty to classify characters. "Er" means near/near. "Elegance" means elegant writing, that is, accent.
Pinyin system
The phonetic system of early Chinese was "reading if" or "direct note", that is, words with the same or similar pronunciation were used to mark the pronunciation of other words.
Later, "anti-tangent" was invented: generally, two Chinese characters are combined in phonology, and the initials of the former are read together with the finals of the latter. With the changes of the times, the ancient phonology is different from the modern phonology.
Adoption area
The ancient national strength of China was at its peak, which influenced the ethnic groups in the neighboring areas to adopt or refer to Chinese and Chinese characters as the local pronunciation and writing.
In terms of writing, for example, Chinese characters were directly used in the Korean peninsula from the period of Silla reunification, and there are also theories that ancient Korea also used the writing prevailing in Yan and Qi areas. Qidan created his own characters based on Chinese characters (the fine print of Qidan is an alphabet spelling word created according to Uyghur). Jin (Jurchen) Chinese characters are transformed into new variants on the basis of the combination of Qidan Chinese characters and Chinese characters. Xixia characters are also based on the transformation of Chinese characters.
In phonetics, for example, the pronunciation of Chinese characters in modern Japanese retains the Jiangnan sound of the Six Dynasties and the Chang 'an sound of the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese characters in modern Korean retain the Chang 'an sound of the Tang Dynasty, and the Chinese characters in modern Vietnamese retain the Chang 'an sound of the Tang Dynasty. See Japanese Kanji, Korean Kanji and Vietnamese for details.