Before there was no vernacular in ancient times, did people speak in classical Chinese?

Chinese culture. Broad and profound, the changes in the way language is used over thousands of years have led to the progress of our society and the development of culture. In Chinese textbooks from elementary school to high school, we can always learn about ancient classical Chinese texts, and usually the dialogues of the characters in them are "Zhihu Zhiye", which can also be glimpsed from various famous works.

Until the New Culture Movement.

Advocating vernacular writing, we are only now gradually using vernacular for dialogue, because it can convey meaning in very simple sentences. So before the advent of vernacular Chinese, did people speak in classical Chinese?

In fact, it is not, when we study ancient texts, we can feel that if a sentence is explained in classical Chinese, then the meaning of this sentence is really difficult to express in a clear introduction. In fact, in ancient times there were two language systems.

First of all, in the writing of texts such as cantata and imperial examinations.

The language used in the article is more formal and self-contained, such as a strict choice of word count, genre and content orientation. In addition, because the teaching received in school is relatively uniform, it is basically to prepare for the exam, so the language bureau is very obscure and within the system.

Expression. Secondly, in daily life, although people's conversations are not as brief as the current vernacular dialogues, the language use of this language system is relatively normal compared to the requirements of writing articles.

In fact, although vernacular writing is an inevitable product of the development of the times, in fact, classical Chinese has its own unique style, which makes the article more atmospheric and has a certain literary value. For example, "Zizhi Tongjian".

This book, if Sima Guang is said.

To describe it in the vernacular, then it is difficult to have a fascinating feeling, to be honest, so, Lu Xun.

The vernacular articles of the ancients also have a deeper literary value.

Each era has its own language system, in short, it is for better communication, so we should look at this problem dialectically, every change in the language communication system is the progress of the times, so we should grasp this law and conform to the development of the times.

At most, the ancients used vernacular for daily conversation during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but it was not the vernacular of today. It's still a bit of a literary style, as for the earlier can't be tested, because there are many words whose pronunciation is very different in ancient and modern times, if you don't believe it, you can listen to Hakka dialect that retains part of the ancient Chinese pronunciation, and you can understand it. Besides, there was no such thing as vernacular writing in ancient times.

This is like Latin in the West, in ancient times Latin was the lingua franca of the West, the written language, and although each country had its own language that was easy to understand, at that time, the common people still spoke their own language.

Classical Chinese is the language used by the ancients to write articles, which is a simplified version of the colloquial language of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, which means that the ancients really used a language similar to classical Chinese to communicate, just like modern classical Chinese. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, although the language was still dominated by classical Chinese, the way of speaking was constantly changing. By the time of the Tang Dynasty, according to the content and form of some poetry collections, it can be seen that the text format was completely different from the classical Chinese format at that time, and the way they usually communicated could be very detailed.

And in the Song Dynasty, Tang poems and Song lyrics. So needless to say, the expression of the words is more detailed and easier to understand than that of poetry, so it is even more impossible to communicate in the oral style of classical Chinese, on the contrary, it is a greater change than that of the Tang Dynasty, and the way of speaking is more convenient. It can be said that it is almost the same as the modern way of language.

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was almost the same as now.

The Chinese language is formed through continuous improvement and development, and the earlier it is, the higher the generalization rate of the language because of the scarcity of words. Later, through the continuous development of the times, the Chinese Chinese language was gradually improved, and by the Song Dynasty, the language spoken by ordinary people was very close to the modern language, which can be called ancient vernacular.

Ancient people generally spoke in the vernacular. "Classical Chinese" is relative to "Vernacular Language". The first "text" is the meaning of a written article. "Yan" means to write, express, record, etc.

It must be written in classical Chinese, but daily communication should be "ancient vernacular". There are great differences in the spoken and written languages of different historical periods and different regions.

Ancient writing used classical Chinese, but daily communication is not necessarily, if you really use classical Chinese to communicate, then it is not a sentence to say so, chat for half a day, should have their own easy-to-understand language.

The earlier the era, the less the number of words, the more generalized the sentences, such as the Book of Songs, which is actually a collection of folk songs from the ancient Western Zhou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period, we can easily find that the text in it is very short, known as the composition of classical Chinese.

Compared with the modern vernacular, classical Chinese was used before 1919, which is what we usually call ancient Chinese.

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.

Mr. Wang Li, a famous linguist, pointed out in "Ancient Chinese":"Classical Chinese refers to the written language of ancient Chinese, which was formed on the basis of the spoken language of the pre-Qin period and the ancient books of later literati. "According to historians, in the pre-Qin period, classical Chinese appeared.

With the changes of history, the difference between classical Chinese and spoken Chinese has gradually expanded, and classical Chinese has become the exclusive use of literati. In the later evolution, fu, poems, strategies, words, songs, pun texts, and bagu texts appeared. The classics that have been handed down have become the classical Chinese we see now.

<> since the differences between classical Chinese and spoken language have widened over time and are not applicable to the daily lives of ancient people, how did classical Chinese survive and survive for so long? To understand the emergence of classical Chinese, it is necessary to know why the ancients wrote in classical Chinese. For these reasons, classical Chinese as we see it today was directly born.

So, what was it that made the ancients choose to write in classical Chinese? With the popularity of printing, writing became easier, but classical Chinese remained popular. This is because classical Chinese, unlike spoken Chinese, can highlight the identity of scholars, improve the style of scholars, and express their sense of superiority.

Even though Kong Yiji had been reduced to a tavern, he still shook his head and said"back"words, and show off what you know"back"There are nine ways to write words, which is a method of spiritual victory. I think he's very cultured. In fact, in ancient times, writing in classical Chinese was a monopoly of knowledge.

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First of all, you asked: Did the ancients speak in classical Chinese?

No. Classical Chinese is a written script used by the ancients, and ordinary people do not speak classical Chinese when they communicate with each other, but speak vernacular. To give a very simple example, Classical Chinese was abolished in 1915 by the New Culture Movement, and before the abolition of Classical Chinese, people read books, wrote articles, and wrote written materials, such as letters, marriage contracts, land deeds, etc., all according to Classical Chinese.

But oral communication is vernacular, and I asked my grandfather more than 50 years ago, and he told me that it was like this before the New Culture Movement.

Ancient classical Chinese is the patent of scholars, only those who have gone to school can write Chinese, and those who have no culture do not understand classical Chinese.

And then why did classical Chinese appear?

Classical Chinese originated from the Shang Dynasty oracle bone inscriptions. Before the Warring States period, classical Chinese officially appeared. As early as more than 3,000 years ago, the text was engraved on oracle bones, which not only made the text laborious, but also limited the materials, and the above-mentioned various technical difficulties led to the fact that the articles at that time were usually concise and concise key words or short sentences, and thus laid the grammatical foundation of ancient Chinese classical Chinese.

It was only after the New Culture Movement that classical Chinese was abolished and vernacular was introduced. I don't know if you have noticed it, even if it is now in the vernacular, the sentences of writing articles are still different from what we usually say.

It's simple. The ancients basically used vernacular when they spoke, but literate scholars also spoke some literary language, and the literate ones appeared to be literate. But even if he is a very literate writer, he will not speak at length, otherwise others will not understand.

Chinese characters are ideograms, that is, each word has its own meaning, the ancestors created a lot of Chinese characters, can have 100,000 words, but now commonly used only two or three thousand words, so the current literacy rate of people is really very low. Classical Chinese is a text expression with a single word as the basic meaning, so if you want to write classical Chinese, you naturally have to write a lot of rare words, and if you pursue the ornate rhetoric, then you need more words. So, mastering a lot of text opens up the layers.

So when speaking, there are huge defects in the literary language, because there are only a few kinds of human pronunciation, vowels and consonants, etc., which has a large number of words in one sound, so when the literary language is spoken, it is impossible for people to grasp the accurate meaning, and it is useless to have a high level of education, and they can't understand it. In order not to interfere with speaking communication? We also have a way, that is, to form words, add a large number of pronunciation combinations to express more meaning, and at the same time increase vocabulary, in addition to using a single word as the basic meaning expression, increase the combination of words and words to form a large number of words to express the basic meaning.

In this way, if there are many combinations of pronunciations, you will be able to distinguish the meaning of different pronunciations, and at the same time, the number of kanji required will be greatly reduced, and your language expression ability will be greatly enhanced.

However, modern reforms, because the times are developing rapidly, for people, there is really no time and energy to learn tens of thousands of Chinese characters, and it really takes decades to master tens of thousands of Chinese characters and write and apply them proficiently. We pursue the uniformity of listening, speaking, reading and writing, that is, writing vernacular in the vernacular, so that we can keep up with the pace of the times, and even further lead the pace of the times.

Of course, it doesn't mean that tens of thousands of Chinese characters are useless as reserves. In the future, if there is a big knowledge of the universe, you can take out one or two thousand more words, and then form another word, and you can easily deal with it. The Chinese simply can't use the text reserve in this piece.