A History of the Chinese Language

Hongyuan Dong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317743897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

A History of the Chinese Language provides a comprehensive introduction to the historical development of the Chinese language from its proto Sino-Tibetan roots in prehistoric times to Modern Standard Chinese. Taking a highly accessible and balanced approach, it presents a chronological survey of the various stages of Chinese language development, covering crucial aspects such as phonology, syntax and semantics.

Features include:

• Coverage of the key historical stages in Chinese language development, such as Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, Early Modern Chinese, Classical Chinese and Modern Standard Chinese
• Treatment of core linguistic aspects of the Chinese language including phonological changes, grammatical development, lexical evolution, vernacular writing, Chinese characters and Modern Chinese dialects
• Inclusion of many authentic Chinese legends and texts throughout the book, presented through a rigorous framework of linguistic analysis to help students to build up strong critical and evaluative skills and acquire valuable cultural knowledge
• Integration of materials from different disciplines, such as archaeology, anthropology, history and sociolinguistics, to highlight the cultural and social background of each period of the language
• Helpful appendices to aid students with no prior knowledge of linguistics or the Chinese language
• Companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/dongoffering a wealth of supplementary resources such as additional exercises, answer keys and audio recordings of the sounds of Middle and Old Chinese.

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Written by a highly experienced instructor, A History of the Chinese Language will be an essential resource for beginning students of Chinese Language and Linguistics and for anyone interested in the history and culture of China.

CHAPTER 1

A walk through time

General introduction

“The Dao that can be spoken of is not the unchanging Dao; the name that can be named is not the unchanging name”,¹ goes the opening phrase from the Dao De Jing,² one of the earliest philosophical works in Ancient China, written by Laozi (fl. sixth century BCE).³ Despite the importance of this book in Chinese culture and thought, its real meaning can be difficult to grasp. Wouldn’t it be ideal if one could travel some 2,500 years back in time and have a word with Laozi, although he would probably be very reluctant to explain anything in words? But would a modern speaker of Chinese and Laozi be able to understand each other, even in Chinese? Definitely not! Although the Dao is constant in Laozi’s philosophy, the language one uses to talk about the Dao changes constantly. This book tells the story of how the Chinese language has evolved from the earliest time that we can have knowledge of to its current usage and state in the twenty-first century.

1.1 WHY STUDY LINGUISTIC HISTORY?

One of the major problems of understanding ancient texts is language. If we had a better idea of the language used in Laozi’s time, it would be much easier for us to understand his thoughts. The same is true of any historical records. Linguistic knowledge can help us grasp the true meaning of these written records and textual interpretations are also the basis for the study of history and ancient thoughts. Language is an important aspect of human society and a history of language can touch upon how language was used in society at different times. In other words, we can approach history from a linguistic perspective. Even if we only look at how a language has changed, without also looking into the related sociocultural background, it is still a fascinating topic for those of us who love languages. Elements from Classical Chinese can be readily spotted in Modern Standard Chinese, which makes it necessary for native speakers, researchers into Chinese culture, and students of the Chinese language to have some knowledge of the ancient language.

1.2 THE LINGUISTIC SCOPE OF THE HISTORY OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

In what aspects can a language change? There are a certain number of basic sounds in each language. Historical phonology studies how this system of sounds changes. For example, there are 22 consonants in Modern Standard Chinese, but more than 1,000 years ago, in the language that can be said to be the ancestor of Modern Standard Chinese, there were more than 30 consonants. How were they pronounced? How did they change into the 22 consonants of Modern Standard Chinese? Chapters 3 to 5 focus on such changes and try to reconstruct the sound systems at different times. Besides sound change, studies of syntactic change look into how the rules of grammar and forms of grammatical constructions change. For example, “John is scolded by the principal” is a passive sentence. The Chinese equivalent of this construction is formed with the word bèi. Thus we want to know when this usage first appeared in historical texts and how it developed into its current form and usage. Chapters 6–7 will illustrate the key features of Classical Chinese and how some of the typical syntactic constructions in Modern Standard Chinese came about. Another aspect of language change lies in the meaning of words, which will be dealt with briefly in Chapter 8.

We use the term “Modern Standard Chinese” to refer to the official language of China. Chapter 9 will give an historical account of how this national, standard language was created and its major features will also be discussed. Alongside the national language there are many regional varieties of Chinese which, to some extent, developed from the same ancestral language. Chapter 10 will give a brief description of such varieties of Chinese in terms of their connection to the ancestral language. This branch of study is traditionally called dialectology in Chinese linguistics.

This book deals with how the sounds, words and syntax of Chinese have changed and how the current varieties of Chinese are related to earlier stages of the language. It would probably make our task easier if there were video clips or audio recordings from these ancient times to show how the language was used then, but since we do not have such materials, studies of linguistic history have to rely on written records. The great thing is that written records of Chinese go back at least 3,200 years to the oracle bone script in the Shang Dynasty (sixteenth to eleventh century BCE). But what about the Chinese language before that? Even though we do not have extensive written records from before the Shang Dynasty, the language undoubtedly existed in an earlier spoken form. Using a combination of different methods, we can actually push our hypotheses and knowledge of the language further back to prehistoric times when Chinese was more similar to the ancestral languages of Tibetan and Burmese. We will talk about such genetic relations within the Sino-Tibetan language family in Chapter 2.

Written records are the primary sources of findings in historical linguistics. Actually, the writing system itself should have a history of its own. Chapter 11 will give a sketch of the development of Chinese characters from the oracle bone script to the current simplified forms.

1.3 THE WIDER PICTURE BEYOND THE LINGUISTIC

Although the subject matter of historical linguistics is language itself, it cannot be studied in isolation. When discussing the Chinese language in prehistoric times, we can enlist the help from findings in disciplines such as human population genetics and archaeology. For later stages, where written records are available, the use of these records begins with an inquiry into how and why these written materials were created. Discussions of how language was used in ancient societies can help us better situate our linguistic knowledge, reconstructed through historical linguistics methods. The written records used for the study of the history of the Chinese language include poetry, fiction, Buddhist texts and stories, ancient classics, etc., and these are important cultural products in themselves. To talk about the stages of the history of the language, we will definitely have to touch upon the dynastic history of Ancient China as well. Generally speaking, language changes mostly by itself, naturally, without conscious human effort. But linguistic reforms can also be carried out by governments and people consciously changing various aspects of a language. Such linguistic reforms are usually motivated by certain sociopolitical factors. Therefore, as we go through the different stages of the Chinese language, we will have to develop some understanding of the relevant cultural, historical, social and political backgrounds.

1.4 TERMINOLOGICAL CLARIFICATION

When the word “language” is used in daily conversation, it can refer to spoken or written forms. But in linguistics, “language” primarily refers to the spoken form. In the context of the title of this book, A History of the Chinese Language, what does “the Chinese language” refer to? This is actually a very tricky issue.

First and foremost we have to deal with the more controversial term, “Chinese dialects”. Roughly speaking, people in the northern and southwestern parts of China speak Mandarin Chinese. Within this vast area, there are different dialects that are mutually intelligible. For example, a person from the city of Harbin in the Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China can converse with a person from Beijing quite freely if they speak their own dialects. Although it would be a little bit more difficult for a native of Beijing to speak with someone from Chengdu in the Sichuan Province in Southwest China, they can still maintain a high level of mutual intelligibility when they use their own dialects. In the southern and southeastern parts of China, it is often the case that speakers from different regions either have great difficulties understanding each other or cannot communicate at all if they use their local dialects, e.g. Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fukienese, Hakka, etc. A native speaker of Shanghainese cannot communicate with someone who speaks Cantonese, unless they both speak Modern Standard Chinese. Sometimes, even within the same linguistic group, such as Fukienese, it is possible that people from different places cannot communicate with each other in their native tongues. Traditionally, both the mutually intelligible Mandarin dialects and those that are not mutually intelligible in southern and southeastern China are regarded as fāngyán, which literally means “local speech”. The common translation of this term in English is “dialect”. But this translation causes a certain degree of misunderstanding and terminological chaos.

According to Mair (1991: 4) the English word “dialect” refers to “one of two or more mutually intelligible varieties of a given language distinguished by vocabulary, idiom and pronunciation.” For example, someone from London might speak differently from a Sydney native in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary but they can have a conversation with no major problems. This is true of the different dialects within Mandarin Chinese, but not true of the situation between Mandarin and Cantonese, or between Cantonese and Shanghainese. Mair (1991) compares the situation between these major groups of Chinese that are not mutually intelligible to that between English, Dutch, Swedish, and other Germanic languages. Clearly, the translation of fāngyán as “dialect” is misleading. Thus Mair (1991) proposes a new term “topolect”, in which “topo” corresponds to “fāng” and “lect” to “yán”. This is indeed a better terminology for what fāngyán means in Chinese. Therefore, it is necessary to keep in mind that the geographic variations of fāngyán have both similarities to, and differences from, the kind of linguistic variations covered under the term “dialect”. However, the term “dialect”, the traditional translation of fāngyán, has been widely used, or misused, according to Mair (1991) and indeed we have a dilemma with various terminologies. For the lack of a better solution, let’s use the term “Chinese dialects” as a convenient way to refer to these different local speeches, while dispensing with the common connotations of the word “dialect”. Now that the term “Chinese dialects”, or simply “dialects”, is established in this book, we can give a more detailed description of the major dialect groups.

Table 1 The major groups of Chinese dialects

Dialects	English	Principal Geographic Distribution
Guānhuà 官話	Mandarin; Northern dialects	Northern and southwestern China (chiefly north of the Yangtze River)
Wú yǔ 吳語	Wu dialect	Shanghai, Zhejiang and southern Jiangsu
Xiāng yǔ 湘語	Xiang dialect; Hunanese	Hunan
Gàn yǔ 贛語	Gan dialect	Jiangxi
Kèjiā huà 客家話	Kejia dialect; Hakka	Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Taiwan
Mǐn yǔ 閩語	Min dialect	Fujian, Taiwan, Hainan
Yuè yǔ 粵語	Yue dialect; Cantonese	G...