Since Old Chinese was the language spoken by the Chinese when such as the ''Analects of Confucius'', the ''Mencius'', and the ''Tao Te Ching'' were written, and was the official language of the unified empire of the Qin Dynasty and long-lasting Han Dynasty, Old Chinese was preserved for the following two in the form of Classical Chinese, a style of written Chinese that emulates the grammar and vocabulary of Old Chinese as presented in those works. During that time, Classical Chinese was the usual language used for official purposes in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. However, there is great variation within Classical Chinese, based mainly on when something was written, and the Classical Chinese of more recent writers, as well as that found outside of China, would probably be difficult for someone from Confucius's era to understand.
Phonology
:''For the pronunciation of Classical Chinese, see
Since Chinese is written with characters, not , it is not easy for the Chinese to notice that the . The story of the reconstruction of Old Chinese began with the recitation of ''Shijing'', the first and most revered collection of poetry in China. Generations of Chinese literati were baffled to find that many lines in ''Shijing'' didn't rhyme smoothly, being unaware that the sounds of the Chinese language had long changed. Scholars such as Zhu Xi suggested that the ancients had their own way of reciting poems: they would change the reading of a character temporarily to fit the rhyming scheme. Such a way of reciting or reading poetry is called ''xieyin'' .
Jiao Hong and Chen Di of the Ming Dynasty were the first persons to argue coherently that the lines in ''Shijing'' didn't rhyme just because the sounds had changed. The reconstruction of Old Chinese began when Gu Yanwu of the Qing Dynasty divided the sounds of Old Chinese into 10 groups . Other Qing scholars followed Gu's steps, refining the division. The Swedish sinologist, Bernhard Karlgren, was the first person to reconstruct Old Chinese with Latin alphabet .
The sounds of Old Chinese are difficult to reconstruct, because the way the Chinese writing system indicates pronunciation is much less clear than the way an alphabet does. Scholars who try to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese have to rely on indirect evidence. They heavily rely on those rhymed pre-Qin texts, chiefly ''Shijing'', and the fact that were homophones or near-homophones when the characters were first created.
There is much dispute over the phonology of Old Chinese. Today it is agreed that Old Chinese had consonant clusters such as ''*kl-'' and ''gl-'', which do not occur in any modern Chinese dialect. However, the following issues are still open to debate:
*that Old Chinese had consonants or other rare features.
*that Old Chinese was not monosyllabic.
*that Early Old Chinese was not a tonal language. The tones of Middle Chinese evolved from consonants in Old Chinese that had since changed or disappeared.
Lexicon
The traditional view is that Chinese is an without inflection. However, since Henri Maspero's pioneering work, there have been scholars seriously studying the of Old Chinese. Sagart provides a summary of these efforts, and a word-list based on his work is available at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database .
Grammar
The grammar of Old Chinese is not identical to that of Classical Chinese. Many usages found in Classical Chinese are absent in Old Chinese. For example, the word 其 can be used as a third-person pronoun in Classical Chinese, but not in Old Chinese, where it serves as a third-person possessive adjective .
There is no in Old Chinese, the copula 是 in Middle and modern Chinese being a near demonstrative in Old Chinese.
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