For example, the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period are ancient, and the Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty are also ancient to us. But the pre-Qin period in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period is also ancient for the Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty.
The spoken language in the pre-Qin era was actually the later classical Chinese. The wind in The Book of Songs is a folk custom and the most popular pop music at that time, but it is this "wind" that is not popular for us, even for people in the Tang and Song Dynasties. Because the dialects and popular languages in the pre-Qin period became classical Chinese in the later evolution, which is the so-called ancient Chinese.
In the middle Tang Dynasty, the ancient prose movement promoted by Liu Zongyuan and Han Yu actually advocated restoring the pre-Qin language system and using the pre-Qin vernacular as the writing language.
In the Tang dynasty, there was a great difference between vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese. By the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, the folk vernacular culture was not much different from the present vernacular. You can look at the divertimento of the Yuan Dynasty (Nanqu and Beiqu). The script of this kind of opera is actually written in folk vernacular, which is very colloquial. You can also look at Zhu's articles in the Song Dynasty. Although Neo-Confucianism in Song Dynasty is one of the most obscure parts of China's philosophy, Zhu's articles are very popular. The four classical novels A Dream of Red Mansions, The Water Margin and The Journey to the West's Romance of the Three Kingdoms in Ming and Qing Dynasties are all vernacular novels, among which the language of The Water Margin is closer to the vernacular. Therefore, Water Margin and Jin Ping Mei have become good materials for understanding life in Ming and Qing Dynasties through language.
A Dream of Red Mansions is the highest peak of vernacular novels, while Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio is the highest peak of classical Chinese novels. The year when Pu Songling died happened to be the year when Cao Xueqin was born. The two books were almost in the same historical era, which just shows that both vernacular and classical Chinese existed in the language system of ancient China people.
It was not until the May 4th Movement and the New Literature Movement that Hu Shicai put forward "On the Improvement of Writing Style" and personally tried the first collection of vernacular poems and songs that advocated the use of vernacular Chinese. At this time, the status of vernacular Chinese is in full swing. With the pace of modernization and modernization, the existence of classical Chinese is almost eliminated. But the vernacular Chinese was not invented by Hu Shi, and it appeared as early as 1000 years ago.