History of the Chinese Language - Page 2

Development of the Language

Language vs. Dialects

Spoken Chinese comprises many dialects that can be classified in seven main groups. Although they employ a common written form, they are mutually unintelligible and for this reason are sometimes referred to as languages; the differences among them are analogous to the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among the Romance languages. The fact is, however, that most Chinese speak the same dialect, which Westerners call Mandarin; its standard of pronunciation is the speech of Peking. Mandarin also forms the basis of the modern written vernacular, Baihua, which supplanted classical Chinese in the schools after 1917, and of the official spoken language, Putonghua, prescribed in 1956 for nationwide use in schools. For this reason Westerners usually speak of a single Chinese language.

The modern Chinese dialects (from the 11th century AD) evolved from Old (or Archaic) Chinese (8th-3d century BC), the sounds of which have been tentatively reconstructed. Although monosyllabic, Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. The next stage of Chinese that has been carefully analyzed was Middle (or Ancient) Chinese (to about the 11th century AD). By this time the rich sound system of Old Chinese had progressed far toward the extreme simplification seen in the modern dialects. For instance, Old Chinese possessed series of consonants such as p, ph, b, bh (where h stands for aspiration or rough breathing). In Middle Chinese this had become p, ph, bh; in Mandarin only p and ph (now spelled b and p) are left.

The modern Mandarin syllable consists, at the least, of a so-called final element, namely, a vowel ( a, e ) or semivowel ( i, u ) or some combination of these (a diphthong or triphthong), with a tone (level, rising, dipping, or falling) and sometimes a final consonant which, however, can only be an n, ng, or r. Old Chinese, however, had in addition a final p, t, k, b, d, g, and m. The final element may be preceded by an initial consonant but never by a consonant cluster; Old Chinese probably had clusters, as at the beginning of klam and glam. As sonic distinctions became fewer for example, as final n absorbed final m, so that syllables such as lam and lan became simply lan the number of Mandarin syllables different from one another in sound fell to about 1300. No fewer words existed, but more words were homonyms. Thus, the words for poetry, bestow, moist, lose, corpse, and louse had all been pronounced differently from one another in Middle Chinese; in Mandarin they all become shi in the level tone. In fact, so many homonyms came to exist that ambiguity would have become intolerable if compound words had not simultaneously developed. Thus, poetry, became shi-ge, "poetry-song"; teacher became shi-zhang, "teacher-elder." Although a modern Chinese dictionary contains many more such compounds than one-syllable expressions, most of the compounds still break down into independently meaningful syllables.