Why didn t the ancients use vernacular, how convenient it was?

This has a lot to do with the ancient literature movement of the Tang Dynasty. During the period of the Six Dynasties, the prose flourished, and the prose declined. The formalist fashion of pursuing rhythm and duality, ornate rhetoric and neat sentence structure has become a shackle for reflecting real life and expressing thoughts and feelings.

As social life became more and more extensive and complex, the demand for stylistic reform also arose. From the Liang Dynasty to the Sui Dynasty, there were constantly people who opposed the ancient scripts and advocated the ancient texts. At the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, Chen Ziang unfurled the retro banner, changed his style, and achieved unprecedented success after Han Yu.

The most direct impact of the Han and Liu Ancient Writing Movement was the overpowering of the empty and gorgeous prose that had prevailed since the Six Dynasties, and the restoration of prose to its traditional status. The success of the Guwen movement gave rise to a new kind of plain and unpretentious prose, which was naturally far superior to the prose in terms of narrative romance. People use it to write books and theories, and even write scenes, narratives, lyrics, and words.

In general, the victory of the Guwen Movement made Jingshi the five unifications of literature. At the same time, it created the ancient literary tradition represented by the Eight Great Masters of Ancient Literature of the Tang and Song Dynasties in the history of Chinese literature, effectively dealt a blow to the beautiful and weak literary style that had been popular for 300 years, and directly inspired the ancient literary movement of the Northern Song Dynasty, and its influence on prose was as far as that of the Qing Dynasty.

I like the pre-Qin culture very much, and I guess it was probably written in bamboo slips or gold utensils and skulls at that time. If there are too many words, the cost is very high. For example, Qin Shi Huang's reading of 60 catties of music every day is an example.

Therefore, in order to facilitate the record, the words are omitted, and everyone probably doesn't speak like that. Later, after the invention of paper, there was relatively little classical Chinese, which is also corroborated. In later generations, many of them probably have the reason for being vassally elegant, and because many of them pay attention to battles and escorts, they are more imposing to write.

This is related to economic development, the Ming and Qing dynasties, is the most glorious era of feudal society, but also the peak of feudal economic development, the emergence of capitalist sprouts, reflected in the literature is the civic literature is particularly developed, like the four **, the language is close to the vernacular, that is, almost colloquial. The other reason is what the third floor said.

I usually speak vernacular, but I just write classical Chinese when I write. A written style. If you look at the books of the Song Dynasty, it is easy to understand, and the culture of the citizens flourished. Classical Chinese is actually a cultural monopoly. Ordinary people can't understand it.

Why didn't the ancient people take a plane, how convenient it was.

Ordinary people usually speak in the vernacular, and intellectuals only use classical Chinese when writing articles.

Of course, the vernacular at that time was different from the current Mandarin, but close to the language in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms".

This belongs to the development of language, and everything has a process of gradual improvement.

It's verbose to put it bluntly. Affirm one thing and just say "Yes." Or "no" and that's it. Now to say, yes, yes, know.

The vernacular is developed step by step.

The ancient way of speaking.

Classical Chinese is more linguistically beautiful.

To the popular with the reader.

The ancients spoke in the vernacular.

The Mandarin of the ancients was very different from what we have now, not only in terms of pronunciation, but also in terms of the composition and meaning of words.

The literary works of the pre-Qin period are very concise, for example, the "Spring and Autumn Period" records the history of the Lu State for 300 years and is only 18,000 words, the ancient literary writing skills are in the hands of readers, and the literacy rate in ancient times is mostly below 10%, and the pre-Qin period is about 2%, most of the common people do not understand classical Chinese at all, and they do not know classical Chinese to speak and communicate, and they use the vernacular at that time.

Later, the spoken language changed, and gradually disappeared from daily life, and became a style specially used for writing. During the Tang Dynasty, it became popular with mixed literature, so vernacular literature began to gradually enter literary works. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the text in the ** book was already relatively white.

During the period from the Western Jin Dynasty to the Song Dynasty, because the north has been ruled by foreign races, and the Han people in the south are also mixed with ethnic minorities, the accent of the Chinese began to change, especially the language of the northerners began to be Huized.

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the pronunciation of ancient Chinese and the present was already very small, and the grammatical difference was not large.

During the Qin Dynasty, the ancient people usually spoke and the vernacular spoken by the current people were also similar, only the upper class who had received education and could read could speak classical Chinese, and for the poor people, they did not know a single big character, and they would definitely not speak classical Chinese when communicating with people on weekdays. In the Han Dynasty, classical Chinese began to have a bit of a gap with the vernacular, first of all, the limitation of educational conditions, and secondly, the status of Confucianism was established in the Han Dynasty, which led to the subset of classics and histories This kind of books became the main carrier of written language, that is to say, classical Chinese became a text to be written on paper, but there was no restriction on personal expression in spoken language.

With the passage of time, the gap between classical Chinese and vernacular literature is getting bigger and bigger, to the Tang Dynasty, vernacular literature began to appear, and then to the Song Dynasty, classical Chinese and vernacular literature have been very different, and when the Yuan Dynasty, because the mother tongue of the ruling class is not Chinese, in some official documents, vernacular Chinese is also used more, in the lyrics and songs of the Yuan Dynasty, the content is very inclined to colloquial language, and even the Ming and Qing dynasties, basically one thing vernacular Chinese, and now people say that there is no difference in colloquial language, after the May Fourth Movement, Vernacular Chinese has completely replaced classical Chinese. Because classical Chinese was the official language in ancient times, there is very little information about the folk vernacular language, and the historical books and other documents we know about in ancient times were recorded by the people of the time in classical Chinese, so it has created a false impression that the people of the past spoke classical Chinese.

The language used by the ancients in communication is also vernacular, which is not much different from what people usually speak today, but the vernacular language is extremely unstable, and the languages of different dynasties and places are also very different. There is also a small story about vernacular literature, during the May Fourth Movement, in order to promote vernacular literature, Liu Bannong of Peking University once went to discuss with Zhang Taiyan, a master of Chinese studies, and Zhang Taiyan was also very satisfied, but when Zhang Taiyan asked Liu Bannong what the standard of vernacular literature was, Liu Bannong said for a long time that Beijing dialect should be used as the standard.

If the people of different dynasties and regions only write in the language of their own ethnic group or region, then this will have a great impact on the unity and inheritance of Chinese civilization. So the ancients understood this very early on, and at the very beginning they recorded history and wrote books in classical Chinese.