Did we speak classical Chinese in ancient times?

1. Did daily life in ancient times involve classical Chinese?

Classical Chinese is an article written in ancient Chinese. Among the ancient Chinese written materials that have been spread to modern times, oracle bone inscriptions are the earliest. About four thousand years ago.

In the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, hundreds of schools of thought emerged, and a large number of works recorded historical facts and scientific achievements, as well as elaborated on philosophical and political views. Most of the 13,269 printed works written by 596 writers listed in "Hanshu Yiwenzhi" were produced in this era.

The intellectuals of later generations, from the Tang and Song Dynasties to the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, wrote articles based on the works of that era from word choice to grammar. This is classical Chinese.

Classical Chinese and ancient works are two different concepts.

Although most ancient works, including literature, history, philosophy and natural science works, are written in classical Chinese, that is, they are written using the vocabulary and grammar of the pre-Qin period, some of them are also written in the spoken language of the time. Some people call them ancient vernacular, such as the "legends" of the Tang and Song Dynasties, the novels "Water Margin" and "Journey to the West" of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, etc. On the contrary, modern people also write articles in classical Chinese, such as Lu Xun's "A Brief History of Chinese Novels" and some of Mao Zedong's letters.

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In other words: the so-called classical Chinese articles are articles written using the vocabulary and grammar of the pre-Qin period, not all ancient works. Of course, it was impossible for the ancients to use classical Chinese in their daily speech. However, due to the time gap, their vernacular still has the flavor of classical Chinese when viewed today... 2. Did ancient Chinese speak classical Chinese?

Classical Chinese In fact, it is the written language of ancient China, and their spoken language is more life-like.

Just like there are differences between written and spoken modern Chinese, it’s just that with the development of Chinese, the difference between written and spoken modern Chinese is not that big. The written language of ancient Chinese, what is now known as classical Chinese, is too different from people's daily speech and cannot be understood by ordinary people (uneducated people), so the vernacular was promoted in modern times.

Mandarin, Wu dialect, etc. are actually equivalent to today's Mandarin and dialects. This has nothing to do with classical Chinese being written or spoken. The tones of ancient Chinese are indeed different from modern Chinese. There are five tones, but this is only a phonetic problem in Chinese. You can take a look at Mr. Wang Li's "History of Ancient Chinese". 3. In ancient times, China spoke classical Chinese, but now it speaks vernacular (Putonghua), and Singapore and other countries also speak Chinese

It was hundreds of years ago when China spoke classical Chinese. There was no industrial revolution at that time, and China was still in a feudal period. The navigation industry at that time was still very backward. Han Chinese culture has not spread there yet.

We assume that the feudal period is used to locate the "ancient times" you are talking about. At that time, "Singapore and other countries" were still primitive societies, and the language should be in "dialect" (probably with sign language) species), which is the form of primitive tribes in some Amazon jungles or uninhabited islands in Central and South America.

So there is a time difference between his "ancient times" and our "ancient times". We were at the end of feudalism, and "classical Chinese" had actually ended (I guess Singapore still used vernacular at that time). Take Vietnam as an example: their language was written for them by the French after World War I and World War II. Before that, they still used patois. The time when Singapore had writing and formal language should have been the era of large-scale Chinese migration. That at least goes back to a time earlier than "Zheng Chenggong".

In short, I think that the language history of Singapore has definitely changed rapidly from "traditional language" to "vernacular". During the period of ancient Chinese language (i.e. "classical Chinese"), the transition period in their language evolution process was very short. Not even that. It should have been brought by immigrants from China who already spoke the vernacular in the later period.

In addition, on this issue, it is necessary to study not only the history of "Singapore, etc.", but also the cultural development history of China's Lingnan, Southern Guangdong, Southern Fujian and other coastal areas. 4. Did people in ancient times speak classical Chinese or Mandarin?

Dialects have existed since ancient times. The words spoken by the ancients were first of all their own dialects. People with different dialects used Mandarin (ancient common language, just like today's Mandarin as Same as lingua franca). Dialects are constantly changing, and so are the official dialects. As the written language of what the ancients said, classical Chinese is relatively stable, but it will gradually change after a certain distance from the spoken language.

Therefore, what the ancients said can only be said in ancient dialects, but when communicating with people from different places, use ancient Mandarin! So of course the person from whomever speaks will have their own opinions! If you are an official or someone with status, many of them speak Mandarin, which is almost equivalent to today's Mandarin. However, there is more than one kind of Mandarin, and it also varies by region.

Mandarin is roughly divided into North China Mandarin, Northwest Mandarin, Southwest Mandarin and Jianghuai Mandarin, represented by Beijing dialect, Chengdu dialect, Xi'an dialect and Yangzhou dialect respectively. North China Mandarin and Northwest Mandarin are spoken in the east and west of northern China respectively, while Southwest Mandarin and Jianghuai Mandarin are spoken respectively in the west and east of the vast areas in southern China except for Wu, Gan, Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian, Hakka and other dialect areas.

The internal consistency of Mandarin is relatively large. Except for some Mandarin in the southern region, most regions can communicate with each other.

"Guanhua" was the earliest name for the official standard language. In the early days, the official standard Chinese language was called Yayan, Yayin, Tongyu, and Zhengyin. It was called Guanhua in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and it began to be called Guoyu in the Qing Dynasty. , it was renamed Mandarin in 1956; and the word Mandarin evolved into the meaning of "Mandarin dialect". 5. Did the ancient people speak classical Chinese?

The ancient people spoke completely differently from us. If the ancient people were resurrected, we would definitely not be able to understand what they said. The current southern dialect is closer to the ancient spoken language and retains a small amount of it. Some ancient pronunciations are used, so southern dialects are difficult to understand, such as Wu dialect and Cantonese. Of course, there were also dialects in ancient times.

In ancient times, there was also Mandarin, which is a common language equivalent to today’s Mandarin. It is a language that officials must learn to facilitate administrative communication, so it is called Mandarin. Ordinary people can also speak Mandarin if they have a wide range of activities. Use Mandarin to facilitate communication. Of course, we can’t understand the Mandarin either.

Specifically speaking of written language, the classical Chinese you are talking about is a unified written language in ancient times and a written language used uniformly by ancient scholars. The historian you are talking about may mean that many people among the people cannot read and write, and educated people People recorded the meaning of their spoken words. Let me remind you that when ancient historians wrote history, they did not collect materials from the folk. They just selected materials from ancient books. The people you mentioned who were engaged in the collection of folk languages ????may be poetry officials, officials sent by the rulers to collect folk poems from the people. The Book of Songs is based on these poems. Although it was written by officials, what they wrote was basically the original language of the people, but the possibility of literary processing cannot be ruled out.

In short, to put it simply, Mandarin written down is classical Chinese. In ancient times, there were also works that were not written in Mandarin. For example, "Biography of Flowers on the Sea" was written in Wu dialect. 6. Did the ancients speak classical Chinese?

Yes, yes.

Classical Chinese is a written language in ancient China, which mainly includes written language based on the spoken language of the Pre-Qin period. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, items used to record text had not yet been invented. Bamboo slips, silk and other items were used to record text. Silk was expensive, bamboo slips were heavy and the number of words recorded was limited. In order to be able to record words on "one roll" of bamboo slips, If you want to write more things, you need to delete unimportant words. Later, when "paper" was used on a large scale, the ruling class's habit of using "official documents" for their correspondence had been finalized, and the ability to use "classical Chinese" had evolved into a symbol of reading and literacy. Classical Chinese is a relative of vernacular. It is characterized by writing based on words, focusing on allusions, parallel antithesis, neat rhythm and no use of punctuation. It includes a variety of literary styles such as policy, poetry, lyrics, music, eight-legged essay, parallel prose and other ancient prose.

Vernacular writing, also known as colloquial writing and colloquialism, refers to the processed written language based on modern spoken Chinese. It is said relative to classical Chinese. The stylistic reform that began in the late Qing Dynasty can be divided into three stages: "new style", "vernacular style" and "popular language".

Therefore, there was classical Chinese first and then vernacular. Otherwise, who do you think spoke classical Chinese (*^__^*) Hee hee... 7. Did ancient people speak classical Chinese

In ancient times, people had a very low education rate, and they only used classical Chinese when writing articles. , the common people do not understand classical Chinese and speak dialect-type vernacular. In order to make government decrees passable, officials in each era used a common accent, which was generally the accent of the capital at that time. It was called Duhua, Mandarin or Guanhua, which is equivalent to today's Mandarin. In fact, the current Mandarin Chinese uses accents from around Beijing, which to a certain extent is derived from the Mandarin of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

In the early days, there was not much difference between the written language and the spoken language. It was considered vernacular at the time (it is considered classical Chinese today). Around the Ming Dynasty, the vernacular was almost the same as today's language. However, because most of the books were handed down from ancient times, the language used when writing articles was different from the spoken language. The difference between classical Chinese and vernacular began to be obvious.