Old Chinese
Encyclopedia
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang
identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty
, and date from about 1200 BC.
These are the oracle bone
s, short inscriptions carved on tortoise plastrons and ox scapula
e for divinatory purposes, as well as a few brief bronze inscriptions.
The language written is undoubtedly an early form of Chinese, but is difficult to interpret due to the limited subject matter and high proportion of proper name
s.
Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty.
Little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on grammatical particle
s than Classical Chinese.
From early in the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BC, the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions, many of considerable length.
Even longer pre-Classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition.
The oldest parts of the Classic of History
, the Shijing (Book of Songs) and the I Ching
also date from the early Zhou period, and closely resemble the bronze inscriptions in vocabulary, syntax and style.
A greater proportion of this more varied vocabulary has been identified than for the oracular period.
The four centuries preceding the unification of China in 221 BC (the later Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period
) constitute the Chinese classical period in the strict sense.
There are many bronze inscriptions from this period, but they are vastly outweighed by a rich literature written in ink on bamboo and wooden strips and (toward the end of the period) silk.
Although these are perishable materials, and many books were destroyed in the Burning of the Books
in the Qin dynasty
, other texts have been transmitted as copies.
Such works from this period as the Analects, the Classic of Filial Piety, the Mencius
and the Commentary of Zuo have been admired as models of prose style since the Han dynasty
.
The Classical Chinese
language of such works formed the basis of Literary Chinese, which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century.
At the time of the oracle bones, Old Chinese words were uniformly monosyllabic.
Each character of the script represented a single word.
The development of these characters follows the same three stages that characterized Egyptian hieroglyphic, Mesopotamia
n cuneiform
and Mayan hieroglyphic writing.
Some words could be represented by pictures (later stylized) such as rì "sun", rén "person" and mù "tree", by abstract symbols such as sān "three" and shàng "up", or by composite symbols such as lín "grove" (two trees).
About 1000 of the oracle bone characters, nearly a quarter of the total, are of this type, though 300 of them have not yet been deciphered.
Though the pictographic origins are these characters are apparent, they have already undergone extensive simplification and conventionalization.
Evolved forms of most of these characters are still in common use today.
In the next stage, characters of pictorial origin were borrowed to signify similar-sounding words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles (the rebus
strategy).
An example of such a phonetic loan is lái "come", written with the character for a similar-sounding word meaning "wheat".
Sometimes the borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with wú "don't", a borrowing of mǔ "mother".
The final stage was disambiguation of phonetic loans by the addition of semantic indicators, yielding phono-semantic compound characters.
For example, the character originally representing jī "winnowing basket" was also used to write the pronoun and modal particle qí.
Later the less common original word was written with the compound , obtained by adding the symbol zhú "bamboo" to the character.
This type was already used extensively on the oracle bones, and has been the main source of new characters since then.
In the Shuowen Jiezi
, a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century, 80% of the 9,000 characters are classified as phono-semantic compounds.
In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds also have a phonetic nature.
These developments were already present in the oracle bone script.
The characters had been extensively simplified and linearized, implying a significant period of development prior to 1200 BC.
This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character cè "records".
The character is thought to depict bamboo or wooden strips tied together with leather thongs, a writing material known from later archaeological finds.
Development and simplification of the script continued during the pre-Classical and Classical periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles.
The language developed compound words, so that characters came to represent morpheme
s, though almost all morphemes could be used as independent words.
Hundreds of morphemes of two or more syllables also entered the language, and were written with one phono-semantic compound character per syllable.
During the Warring States period
, writing became more widespread, with further simplification and variation, particularly in the eastern states.
The most conservative script prevailed in the western state of Qin
, which would later impose its standard on the whole of China.
, a rhyme dictionary published in 601.
Although many details are still disputed, recent formulations are in substantial agreement on the core issues.
For example, the Old Chinese initial consonants recognized by Li Fang-Kuei and William Baxter
are given below, with Baxter's (mostly tentative) additions given in parentheses:
Most scholars reconstruct clusters of s- with other consonants, and possibly other clusters as well, but this area remains unsettled.
In recent reconstructions, such as the widely accepted system of Baxter, the rest of the Old Chinese syllable consists of
In such systems, Old Chinese has no tone
s; the tonal distinctions of Middle Chinese
are believed to be conditioned by the Old Chinese post-codas.
Most researchers trace the core vocabulary to a Sino-Tibetan ancestor language, with much early borrowing from other neighbouring languages.
The traditional view is that Chinese is an isolating language
, but since Henri Maspero
's pioneering work scholars have been seriously studying the derivational morphology
of Old Chinese.
branch of Austro-Asiatic
have similar tone systems, syllable structure, grammatical features and lack of inflection, but these are believed to be areal features spread by diffusion rather than indicating common descent.
The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, usually as a primary branch.
The evidence consists of some hundreds of proposed cognate words, including such highly basic vocabulary as the following:
Some progress has been made on the sound correspondences between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman
, though hampered by the difficulty of reconstruction on both sides.
The initial systems are similar, except that Proto-Tibeto-Burman lacks an aspiration distinction on initial stops and affricates, which is believed to be a Chinese innovation arising from earlier prefixes.
Proto-Sino-Tibetan is reconstructed with a six-vowel system as in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, with Tibeto-Burman distinguished by the merger of the mid-central vowel *-ə- with *-a-.
The other vowels are preserved by both, with some alternation between *-e- and *-i-, and between *-o- and *-u-.
and middle Yellow River
eastwards across the North China Plain
to Shandong
and then south into the valley of the Yangtze River
.
There are no records of the non-Chinese languages formerly spoken in those areas and subsequently displaced by the Chinese expansion.
However they are believed to have contributed to the vocabulary of Old Chinese, and may be the source of some of the many Chinese words whose origins are still unknown.
Jerry Norman and Mei Tsu-lin have identified early Austroasiatic loanwords in Old Chinese, possibly from the peoples of the lower Yangtze basin known to ancient Chinese as the Yue.
For example, the early Chinese name *kroŋ ( jiāng) for the Yangtze was later extended to a general word for "river" in south China.
Norman and Mei suggest that the word is cognate with Vietnamese
sông (from *krong) and Mon
kruŋ "river".
Haudricourt and Strecker have proposed a number of borrowings from Miao–Yao languages.
These include terms related to rice
cultivation, which began in the middle Yangtze valley: * luʔ ( dào) "unhulled rice" from proto-Miao–Yao *mblauA
Other words are believed to have been borrowed from languages to the south of the Chinese area, but it is not clear which was the original source, e.g. * ke ( jī) "chicken" versus proto-Tai *kəiB proto-Miao–Yao *kai and proto-Viet–Muong
*r-ka.
In ancient times, the Tarim basin
was occupied by speakers of Indo-European
Tocharian languages
, the source of *mjit ( mì) "honey", from Proto-Tocharian *mjət (cognate with English "").
The northern neighbours of Chinese contributed such words as *dok ( dú) "calf" – compare Mongolian
tuɣul and Manchu
tukšan.
A common case is "derivation by tone change", in which words in the departing tone appear to be derived from words in other tones.
If Haudricourt's theory of the origin of the departing tone is accepted, these derivations can be interpreted as a suffix *-s.
As Tibetan has a similar suffix, it may be inherited from Sino-Tibetan.
Examples include: * kit ( jié) "to tie" and *kits ( jì) "hair-knot"
* nup ( nà) "to bring in" and *nuts < *nups ( nèi) "inside"
* tjək ( zhī) "to weave" and *tjəks ( zhì) "silk cloth" (compare Written Tibetan thag "to weave" and thags "woven, cloth")
Another alternation involves transitive verbs with an unvoiced initial and passive or stative verbs with a voiced initial, possibly due to a voiced prefix:
Several other affixes have been proposed.
Old Chinese morphemes were originally monosyllabic, but during the Western Zhou period many new bisyllabic words entered the language.
For example, over 30% of the vocabulary of the Mencius
is polysyllabic, including 9% proper names, though monosyllabic words occur more frequently, accounting for 80–90% of the text.
Many words, particularly expressive adjectives and adverbs, were formed by varieties of reduplication
:
Other bisyllabic morphemes include the famous *ga-lep ( húdié) "butterfly" from the Zhuangzi
.
More words, especially nouns, were formed by compound
ing, including:
However the components of compounds were not bound morpheme
s: they could still be used separately.
A number of bimorphemic syllables appeared in the Classical period, resulting from the fusion of words with following unstressed particles or pronouns.
Thus the negatives *pjut and *mjut are viewed as fusions of the negators *pjə and *mjo respectively with a third-person pronoun *tjə .
In contrast, the rich literature of the Warring States period
has been extensively analysed.
Having no inflection
, Old Chinese was heavily reliant on word order, grammatical particle
s and inherent word classes.
Old Chinese noun
s and pronoun
s did not indicate number or gender, but some personal pronoun
s showed case distinctions:
In the oracle bones, the *l- pronouns were used by the king to refer to himself, and the *ŋ- forms for the Shang people as a whole.
This distinction is largely absent in later texts, and the *l- forms disappeared during the classical period.
In the post-Han period 我 and 其 came to be used as general first and third person pronouns respectively.
The second person pronouns 汝 and 爾 continued to be used interchangeably until their replacement by the phonological variant nǐ in the Tang
period.
There were also demonstrative and interrogative pronouns, but no indefinite pronoun
s.
The distributive pronoun
s were formed with a *-k suffix:
As in the modern language, localizers (compass directions, "above", "inside" and the like) could be placed after nouns to indicate relative positions.
They could also precede verbs to indicate the direction of the action.
Nouns denoting times were another special class (time words); they usually preceded the subject to specify the time of an action.
However the classifiers so characteristic of Modern Chinese did not appear until the Southern and Northern dynasties
.
Old Chinese verb
s, like their modern counterparts, did not show tense or aspect; these could be indicated with adverbs or particles if required.
Verbs could be transitive
or intransitive.
As in the modern language, adjective
s were a special kind of intransitive verb, and a few transitive verbs could also function as modal auxiliaries or as prepositions.
Adverb
s described the scope of a statement or various temporal relationships.
They included two families of negatives starting with *p- and *m-, such as *pjə and *mja .
Modern northern varieties derive the usual negative from the first family, while southern varieties preserve the second.
The language had no adverbs of degree until late in the Classical period.
Particles were function word
s serving a range of purposes.
As in the modern language, there were sentence-final particles marking imperative
s and yes/no questions.
Other sentence-final particles expressed a range of connotations, the most important being *ljaj , expressing static factuality, and *ɦjəʔ , implying a change.
Other particles included the subordination marker *tjə and the nominalizing particles *tjaʔ (agent) and *srjaʔ (object).
Conjunctions could join nouns or clauses.
(a noun phrase, sometimes understood) followed by a predicate
, which could be of either nominal or verbal type.
Before the Classical period, nominal predicates consisted of a copular particle *wjij followed by a noun phrase:
The negated copula *pjə-wjij is attested in oracle bone inscriptions, and later fused as *pjəj .
In the Classical period, nominal predicates were constructed with the sentence-final particle *ljaj instead of the copula 惟, but 非 was retained as the negative form, with which 也 was optional:
The copular verb (shì) of Literary and Modern Chinese dates from the Han period.
In Old Chinese the word was a near demonstrative
("this").
As in Modern Chinese, but unlike most Tibeto-Burman languages, the basic word order in a verbal sentence was subject–verb–object:
Besides inversions for emphasis, there were two exceptions to this rule: a pronoun object of a negated sentence or an interrogative pronoun object would be placed before the verb:
An additional noun phrase could be placed before the subject to serve as the topic.
As in the modern language, yes/no questions were formed by adding a sentence-final particle, and requests for information by substituting an interrogative pronoun for the requested element.
In general, Old Chinese modifiers preceded the words they modified.
Thus relative clause
s were placed before the noun, usually marked by the particle *tjə 之 (in a role similar to Modern Chinese 的 de):
A common instance of this construction was adjectival modification, since the Old Chinese adjective was a type of verb (as on the modern language), but 之 was usually omitted after monosyllabic adjectives.
Similarly, adverbial modifiers, including various forms of negation, usually occurred before the verb.
As in the modern language, time adjunct
s occurred either at the start of the sentence or before the verb, depending on their scope, while duration adjuncts were placed after the verb.
Instrumental and place adjuncts were usually placed after the verb phrase.
These later moved to a position before the verb, as in the modern language.
Anyang
Anyang is a prefecture-level city in Henan province, People's Republic of China. The northernmost city in Henan, Anyang borders Puyang to the east, Hebi and Xinxiang to the south, and the provinces of Shanxi and Hebei to its west and north respectively....
identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty
Shang Dynasty
The Shang Dynasty or Yin Dynasty was, according to traditional sources, the second Chinese dynasty, after the Xia. They ruled in the northeastern regions of the area known as "China proper" in the Yellow River valley...
, and date from about 1200 BC.
These are the oracle bone
Oracle bone
Oracle bones are pieces of bone normally from ox scapula or turtle plastron which were used for divination chiefly during the late Shang Dynasty. The bones were first inscribed with divination in oracle bone script by using a bronze pin, and then heated until crack lines appeared in which the...
s, short inscriptions carved on tortoise plastrons and ox scapula
Scapula
In anatomy, the scapula , omo, or shoulder blade, is the bone that connects the humerus with the clavicle ....
e for divinatory purposes, as well as a few brief bronze inscriptions.
The language written is undoubtedly an early form of Chinese, but is difficult to interpret due to the limited subject matter and high proportion of proper name
Proper name
"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...
s.
Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty.
Little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on grammatical particle
Grammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
s than Classical Chinese.
From early in the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BC, the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions, many of considerable length.
Even longer pre-Classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition.
The oldest parts of the Classic of History
Classic of History
The Classic of History is a compilation of documentary records related to events in ancient history of China. It is also commonly known as the Shàngshū , or simply Shū...
, the Shijing (Book of Songs) and the I Ching
I Ching
The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...
also date from the early Zhou period, and closely resemble the bronze inscriptions in vocabulary, syntax and style.
A greater proportion of this more varied vocabulary has been identified than for the oracular period.
The four centuries preceding the unification of China in 221 BC (the later Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period
Warring States Period
The Warring States Period , also known as the Era of Warring States, or the Warring Kingdoms period, covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC...
) constitute the Chinese classical period in the strict sense.
There are many bronze inscriptions from this period, but they are vastly outweighed by a rich literature written in ink on bamboo and wooden strips and (toward the end of the period) silk.
Although these are perishable materials, and many books were destroyed in the Burning of the Books
Burning of books and burying of scholars
Burning of the books and burying of the scholars is a phrase that refers to a policy and a sequence of events in the Qin Dynasty of Ancient China, between the period of 213 and 206 BC. During these events, the Hundred Schools of Thought were pruned; legalism survived...
in the Qin dynasty
Qin Dynasty
The Qin Dynasty was the first imperial dynasty of China, lasting from 221 to 207 BC. The Qin state derived its name from its heartland of Qin, in modern-day Shaanxi. The strength of the Qin state was greatly increased by the legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the 4th century BC, during the Warring...
, other texts have been transmitted as copies.
Such works from this period as the Analects, the Classic of Filial Piety, the Mencius
Mencius
Mencius was a Chinese philosopher who was arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself.-Life:Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng , Shandong province, only thirty kilometres ...
and the Commentary of Zuo have been admired as models of prose style since the Han dynasty
Han Dynasty
The Han Dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin Dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms . It was founded by the rebel leader Liu Bang, known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu of Han. It was briefly interrupted by the Xin Dynasty of the former regent Wang Mang...
.
The Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
language of such works formed the basis of Literary Chinese, which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century.
Script
At the time of the oracle bones, Old Chinese words were uniformly monosyllabic.
Each character of the script represented a single word.
The development of these characters follows the same three stages that characterized Egyptian hieroglyphic, Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
n cuneiform
Cuneiform
Cuneiform can refer to:*Cuneiform script, an ancient writing system originating in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC*Cuneiform , three bones in the human foot*Cuneiform Records, a music record label...
and Mayan hieroglyphic writing.
Some words could be represented by pictures (later stylized) such as rì "sun", rén "person" and mù "tree", by abstract symbols such as sān "three" and shàng "up", or by composite symbols such as lín "grove" (two trees).
About 1000 of the oracle bone characters, nearly a quarter of the total, are of this type, though 300 of them have not yet been deciphered.
Though the pictographic origins are these characters are apparent, they have already undergone extensive simplification and conventionalization.
Evolved forms of most of these characters are still in common use today.
In the next stage, characters of pictorial origin were borrowed to signify similar-sounding words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles (the rebus
Rebus
A rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames, for example in its basic form 3 salmon fish to denote the name "Salmon"...
strategy).
An example of such a phonetic loan is lái "come", written with the character for a similar-sounding word meaning "wheat".
Sometimes the borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with wú "don't", a borrowing of mǔ "mother".
The final stage was disambiguation of phonetic loans by the addition of semantic indicators, yielding phono-semantic compound characters.
For example, the character originally representing jī "winnowing basket" was also used to write the pronoun and modal particle qí.
Later the less common original word was written with the compound , obtained by adding the symbol zhú "bamboo" to the character.
This type was already used extensively on the oracle bones, and has been the main source of new characters since then.
In the Shuowen Jiezi
Shuowen Jiezi
The Shuōwén Jiězì was an early 2nd century CE Chinese dictionary from the Han Dynasty. Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary , it was still the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give the rationale behind them , as well as the first to use the...
, a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century, 80% of the 9,000 characters are classified as phono-semantic compounds.
In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds also have a phonetic nature.
These developments were already present in the oracle bone script.
The characters had been extensively simplified and linearized, implying a significant period of development prior to 1200 BC.
This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character cè "records".
The character is thought to depict bamboo or wooden strips tied together with leather thongs, a writing material known from later archaeological finds.
Development and simplification of the script continued during the pre-Classical and Classical periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles.
The language developed compound words, so that characters came to represent morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s, though almost all morphemes could be used as independent words.
Hundreds of morphemes of two or more syllables also entered the language, and were written with one phono-semantic compound character per syllable.
During the Warring States period
Warring States Period
The Warring States Period , also known as the Era of Warring States, or the Warring Kingdoms period, covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC...
, writing became more widespread, with further simplification and variation, particularly in the eastern states.
The most conservative script prevailed in the western state of Qin
Qin (state)
The State of Qin was a Chinese feudal state that existed during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods of Chinese history...
, which would later impose its standard on the whole of China.
Phonology
The phonology of Old Chinese has been reconstructed using a variety of evidence, including the phonetic components of Chinese characters, rhyming practice in the Classic of Poetry and descriptions of later stages of the language, especially the QieyunQieyun
The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...
, a rhyme dictionary published in 601.
Although many details are still disputed, recent formulations are in substantial agreement on the core issues.
For example, the Old Chinese initial consonants recognized by Li Fang-Kuei and William Baxter
William H. Baxter
William H. Baxter is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. His specialty is the historical study of the Chinese language. He earned his Ph.D...
are given below, with Baxter's (mostly tentative) additions given in parentheses:
| Stop/ Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :... |
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth.... |
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... / Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labials Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
p | pʰ | b | m̥ | m | ||||
| Dental Coronal consonant Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such... s |
t | tʰ | d | n̥ | n | l̥ | l | (r̥) | r |
| Sibilants | ts | tsʰ | dz | s | (z) | ||||
| Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... s |
(j̥) | (j) | |||||||
| Velars Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
k | kʰ | g | ŋ̊ | ŋ | ||||
| Labiovelars | kʷ | kʷʰ | gʷ | ŋ̊ʷ | ŋʷ | ||||
| Laryngeal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... s |
ʔ | h | (ɦ) | ||||||
| Labiolaryngeals | ʔʷ | hʷ | (w) |
Most scholars reconstruct clusters of s- with other consonants, and possibly other clusters as well, but this area remains unsettled.
In recent reconstructions, such as the widely accepted system of Baxter, the rest of the Old Chinese syllable consists of
- an optional medial -r-, -j- or the combination -rj-
- one of six vowelVowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s:i ə u e o a - an optional coda, which could be a glide -j or -w, a nasal -m, -n or -ŋ, or a stop -p, -t, -k or -kʷ,
- an optional post-coda -ʔ or -s.
In such systems, Old Chinese has no tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
s; the tonal distinctions of Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
are believed to be conditioned by the Old Chinese post-codas.
Vocabulary
The improved understanding of Old Chinese phonology has enabled the study of the origins of Chinese words (rather than the characters with which they are written).Most researchers trace the core vocabulary to a Sino-Tibetan ancestor language, with much early borrowing from other neighbouring languages.
The traditional view is that Chinese is an isolating language
Isolating language
An isolating language is a type of language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio — in the extreme case of an isolating language words are composed of a single morpheme...
, but since Henri Maspero
Henri Maspero
Henri Maspero was a French sinologist, today particularly remembered for his pioneering works on Taoism.-Biography:...
's pioneering work scholars have been seriously studying the derivational morphology
Derivational morphology
Derivational morphology changes the meaning of words by applying derivations. Derivation is the combination of a word stem with a morpheme, which forms a new word, which is often of a different class...
of Old Chinese.
Sino-Tibetan
Middle Chinese and its southern neighbours Tai–Kadai, Miao–Yao and the VieticVietic languages
The Vietic languages are a branch of the Austro-Asiatic language family. The branch was once referred to by the terms Việt–Mường, Annam–Muong, and Vietnamuong, but today these are understood as referring to a sub-branch of Vietic containing only the Vietnamese and Mường languages.-Origins:Based on...
branch of Austro-Asiatic
Austro-Asiatic languages
The Austro-Asiatic languages, in recent classifications synonymous with Mon–Khmer, are a large language family of Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name Austro-Asiatic comes from the Latin words for "south" and "Asia", hence "South Asia"...
have similar tone systems, syllable structure, grammatical features and lack of inflection, but these are believed to be areal features spread by diffusion rather than indicating common descent.
The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, usually as a primary branch.
The evidence consists of some hundreds of proposed cognate words, including such highly basic vocabulary as the following:
| Meaning | Old Chinese | Written Tibetan | Written Burmese Burmese language The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as... |
|---|---|---|---|
| "I" | *ŋa | nga | ŋa |
| "you" | *njaʔ | – | naŋ |
| "not" | *mja | ma | ma |
| "two" | *njijs | gnyis | hnac < *hnit |
| "three" | *sum | gsum | sûm |
| "five" | *ŋaʔ | lnga | ŋâ |
| "six" | *C-rjuk | drug | khrok < *khruk |
| "sun", "day" | *njit | nyi-ma | ne < niy |
| "name" | *mjeŋ | ming | ə-mañ < *ə-miŋ |
| "eye" | *mjuk | mig | myak |
| "fish" | *ŋja | nya | ŋâ |
| "dog" | *kʷʰenʔ | khyi | khwe < khuy |
Some progress has been made on the sound correspondences between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman
Tibeto-Burman languages
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Chinese members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken thoughout the highlands of southeast Asia, as well as lowland areas in Burma ....
, though hampered by the difficulty of reconstruction on both sides.
The initial systems are similar, except that Proto-Tibeto-Burman lacks an aspiration distinction on initial stops and affricates, which is believed to be a Chinese innovation arising from earlier prefixes.
Proto-Sino-Tibetan is reconstructed with a six-vowel system as in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, with Tibeto-Burman distinguished by the merger of the mid-central vowel *-ə- with *-a-.
The other vowels are preserved by both, with some alternation between *-e- and *-i-, and between *-o- and *-u-.
Loanwords
During the Old Chinese period, Chinese civilization expanded from a compact area around the lower Wei RiverWei River
The Wei River is a major river in west-central China's Gansu and Shaanxi provinces. It is the largest tributary of the Yellow River and very important in the early development of Chinese civilization....
and middle Yellow River
Yellow River
The Yellow River or Huang He, formerly known as the Hwang Ho, is the second-longest river in China and the sixth-longest in the world at the estimated length of . Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai Province in western China, it flows through nine provinces of China and empties into...
eastwards across the North China Plain
North China Plain
The North China Plain is based on the deposits of the Yellow River and is the largest alluvial plain of eastern Asia. The plain is bordered on the north by the Yanshan Mountains and on the west by the Taihang Mountains edge of the Shanxi plateau. To the south, it merges into the Yangtze Plain...
to Shandong
Shandong
' is a Province located on the eastern coast of the People's Republic of China. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history from the beginning of Chinese civilization along the lower reaches of the Yellow River and served as a pivotal cultural and religious site for Taoism, Chinese...
and then south into the valley of the Yangtze River
Yangtze River
The Yangtze, Yangzi or Cháng Jiāng is the longest river in Asia, and the third-longest in the world. It flows for from the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai eastward across southwest, central and eastern China before emptying into the East China Sea at Shanghai. It is also one of the...
.
There are no records of the non-Chinese languages formerly spoken in those areas and subsequently displaced by the Chinese expansion.
However they are believed to have contributed to the vocabulary of Old Chinese, and may be the source of some of the many Chinese words whose origins are still unknown.
Jerry Norman and Mei Tsu-lin have identified early Austroasiatic loanwords in Old Chinese, possibly from the peoples of the lower Yangtze basin known to ancient Chinese as the Yue.
For example, the early Chinese name *kroŋ ( jiāng) for the Yangtze was later extended to a general word for "river" in south China.
Norman and Mei suggest that the word is cognate with Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
sông (from *krong) and Mon
Mon language
The Mon language is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon, who live in Burma and Thailand. Mon, like the related language Cambodian—but unlike most languages in Mainland Southeast Asia—is not tonal. Mon is spoken by more than a million people today. In recent years, usage of Mon has...
kruŋ "river".
Haudricourt and Strecker have proposed a number of borrowings from Miao–Yao languages.
These include terms related to rice
Rice
Rice is the seed of the monocot plants Oryza sativa or Oryza glaberrima . As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the West Indies...
cultivation, which began in the middle Yangtze valley:
- *
Other words are believed to have been borrowed from languages to the south of the Chinese area, but it is not clear which was the original source, e.g.
- *
Vietic languages
The Vietic languages are a branch of the Austro-Asiatic language family. The branch was once referred to by the terms Việt–Mường, Annam–Muong, and Vietnamuong, but today these are understood as referring to a sub-branch of Vietic containing only the Vietnamese and Mường languages.-Origins:Based on...
*r-ka.
In ancient times, the Tarim basin
Tarim Basin
The Tarim Basin is a large endorheic basin occupying an area of about . It is located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China's far west. Its northern boundary is the Tian Shan mountain range and its southern is the Kunlun Mountains on the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The...
was occupied by speakers of Indo-European
Indo-European
Indo-European may refer to:* Indo-European languages** Aryan race, a 19th century and early 20th century term for those peoples who are the native speakers of Indo-European languages...
Tocharian languages
Tocharian languages
Tocharian or Tokharian is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The name is taken from the people known to the Greeks as the Tocharians . These are sometimes identified with the Yuezhi and the Kushans. The term Tokharistan usually refers to 1st millennium Bactria, which the...
, the source of *mjit ( mì) "honey", from Proto-Tocharian *mjət (cognate with English "").
The northern neighbours of Chinese contributed such words as *dok ( dú) "calf" – compare Mongolian
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
tuɣul and Manchu
Manchu language
Manchu is a Tungusic endangered language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus...
tukšan.
Word formation
Many students of Chinese have noted "word families", words with related meanings and variant pronunciations, sometimes written using the same character.A common case is "derivation by tone change", in which words in the departing tone appear to be derived from words in other tones.
If Haudricourt's theory of the origin of the departing tone is accepted, these derivations can be interpreted as a suffix *-s.
As Tibetan has a similar suffix, it may be inherited from Sino-Tibetan.
Examples include:
- *
Another alternation involves transitive verbs with an unvoiced initial and passive or stative verbs with a voiced initial, possibly due to a voiced prefix:
- *trjang ( zhāng) "to stretch" and *drjang ( cháng) "long"
- *kens ( jiàn) "to see" and *gens ( xiàn) "to appear"
- *kraw ( jiāo) "to mix" and *graw ( yáo) "mixed, confused"
Several other affixes have been proposed.
Old Chinese morphemes were originally monosyllabic, but during the Western Zhou period many new bisyllabic words entered the language.
For example, over 30% of the vocabulary of the Mencius
Mencius (book)
The Mencius , commonly called the Mengzi, is a collection of anecdotes and conversations of the Confucian thinker and philosopher Mencius. The work dates from the second half of the 4th century BC. It was ranked as a Confucian classic and its status was elevated in Song Dynasty...
is polysyllabic, including 9% proper names, though monosyllabic words occur more frequently, accounting for 80–90% of the text.
Many words, particularly expressive adjectives and adverbs, were formed by varieties of reduplication
Reduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
:
- full reduplication, in which the syllable is repeated, as in *ʔjuj-ʔjuj (威威 wēiwēi) "tall and grand" and *ljo-ljo (俞俞 yúyú) "happy and at ease".
- rhyming semi-reduplication, in which only the final is repeated, as in *ʔiwʔ-liwʔ (窈宨 yǎotiǎo) "elegant, beautiful". The initial of the second syllable is often *l- or *r-.
- alliterative semi-reduplication, in which the initial is repeated, as in *tshrjum-tshrjaj (參差 cēncī) "irregular, uneven".
- vowel alternation, especially of *-e- and *-o-, as in *tshjek-tshjok (刺促 qìcù) "busy" and *greʔ-groʔ (邂逅 xièhòu) "carefree and happy".
Other bisyllabic morphemes include the famous *ga-lep ( húdié) "butterfly" from the Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi (book)
The Taoist book Zhuangzi was named after its purported author Zhuangzi, the philosopher. Since 742 CE, when Emperor Xuanzong of Tang mandated honorific titles for Taoist texts, it has also been known as the Nánhuá Zhēnjīng , literally meaning "True Classic of Southern Florescence," alluding to...
.
More words, especially nouns, were formed by compound
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
ing, including:
- qualification of one noun by another (placed in front), as in *mok-kwra (木瓜 mùguā) "quince" (literally "tree-melon"), and *trjung-njit (中日 zhōngrì) "noon" (literally "middle-day").
- verb–object compounds, as in *sjə-mraʔ (司馬 sīmǎ) "master of the household" (literally "manage-horse"), and *tsak-tshrek (作册 zuòcè) "scribe" (literally "make-writing").
However the components of compounds were not bound morpheme
Bound morpheme
In morphology, a bound morpheme is a morpheme that only appears as part of a larger word; a free morpheme is one that can stand alone.Affixes are always bound. English language affixes are either prefixes or suffixes. E.g., -ment in "shipment" and pre- in "prefix"...
s: they could still be used separately.
A number of bimorphemic syllables appeared in the Classical period, resulting from the fusion of words with following unstressed particles or pronouns.
Thus the negatives *pjut and *mjut are viewed as fusions of the negators *pjə and *mjo respectively with a third-person pronoun *tjə .
Grammar
Little is known of the grammar of the language of the Oracular and pre-Classical periods, as the texts are often of a ritual or formulaic nature, and much of their vocabulary has not been deciphered.In contrast, the rich literature of the Warring States period
Warring States Period
The Warring States Period , also known as the Era of Warring States, or the Warring Kingdoms period, covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC...
has been extensively analysed.
Having no inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
, Old Chinese was heavily reliant on word order, grammatical particle
Grammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
s and inherent word classes.
Word classes
Classifying Old Chinese words is not always straightforward, as words were not marked for function, word classes overlapped, and words of one class could sometimes be used in roles normally reserved for a different class.Old Chinese noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s and pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s did not indicate number or gender, but some personal pronoun
Personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
s showed case distinctions:
| Possessive | Subject | Object | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person | *ljaʔ / *lja / *ljə | ||
| *ŋa | *ŋajʔ | ||
| 2nd person | *njaʔ / *njəjʔ / *njə / *njak | ||
| 3rd person | *gjə | *tjə | |
In the oracle bones, the *l- pronouns were used by the king to refer to himself, and the *ŋ- forms for the Shang people as a whole.
This distinction is largely absent in later texts, and the *l- forms disappeared during the classical period.
In the post-Han period 我 and 其 came to be used as general first and third person pronouns respectively.
The second person pronouns 汝 and 爾 continued to be used interchangeably until their replacement by the phonological variant nǐ in the Tang
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
period.
There were also demonstrative and interrogative pronouns, but no indefinite pronoun
Indefinite pronoun
An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun that refers to one or more unspecified beings, objects, or places.-List of English indefinite pronouns:Note that many of these words can function as other parts of speech too, depending on context...
s.
The distributive pronoun
Distributive pronoun
A distributive pronoun considers members of a group separately, rather than collectively.They include each, any, either, neither and others.* "to each his own" — Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary...
s were formed with a *-k suffix:
- *wək "someone" from *wjəʔ "there is"
- *mak "no-one" from *mja "there is no"
- *kak "each" from *kjaʔ "all"
As in the modern language, localizers (compass directions, "above", "inside" and the like) could be placed after nouns to indicate relative positions.
They could also precede verbs to indicate the direction of the action.
Nouns denoting times were another special class (time words); they usually preceded the subject to specify the time of an action.
However the classifiers so characteristic of Modern Chinese did not appear until the Southern and Northern dynasties
Southern and Northern Dynasties
The Southern and Northern Dynasties was a period in the history of China that lasted from 420 to 589 AD. Though an age of civil war and political chaos, it was also a time of flourishing arts and culture, advancement in technology, and the spreading of Mahayana Buddhism and Daoism...
.
Old Chinese verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
s, like their modern counterparts, did not show tense or aspect; these could be indicated with adverbs or particles if required.
Verbs could be transitive
Transitive verb
In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
or intransitive.
As in the modern language, adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s were a special kind of intransitive verb, and a few transitive verbs could also function as modal auxiliaries or as prepositions.
Adverb
Adverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....
s described the scope of a statement or various temporal relationships.
They included two families of negatives starting with *p- and *m-, such as *pjə and *mja .
Modern northern varieties derive the usual negative from the first family, while southern varieties preserve the second.
The language had no adverbs of degree until late in the Classical period.
Particles were function word
Function word
Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker...
s serving a range of purposes.
As in the modern language, there were sentence-final particles marking imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
s and yes/no questions.
Other sentence-final particles expressed a range of connotations, the most important being *ljaj , expressing static factuality, and *ɦjəʔ , implying a change.
Other particles included the subordination marker *tjə and the nominalizing particles *tjaʔ (agent) and *srjaʔ (object).
Conjunctions could join nouns or clauses.
Sentence structure
As with English and modern Chinese, Old Chinese sentences can be analysed as a subjectSubject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
(a noun phrase, sometimes understood) followed by a predicate
Predicate (grammar)
There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...
, which could be of either nominal or verbal type.
Before the Classical period, nominal predicates consisted of a copular particle *wjij followed by a noun phrase:
予 惟 小 子 *ljaʔ wjij sjewʔ tsjəʔ I be small child
"I am a young person." (Book of History 27, 9)
The negated copula *pjə-wjij is attested in oracle bone inscriptions, and later fused as *pjəj .
In the Classical period, nominal predicates were constructed with the sentence-final particle *ljaj instead of the copula 惟, but 非 was retained as the negative form, with which 也 was optional:
其 至 爾 力 也 其 中 非 爾 力 也 *gjə tjits njəjʔ C-rjək ljajʔ gjə k-ljuŋ pjəj njəjʔ C-rjək ljajʔ its arrive you strength P its centre not you strength P
(of shooting at a mark a hundred paces distant) "That you reach it is owing to your strength, but that you hit the mark is not owing to your strength." (MenciusMenciusMencius was a Chinese philosopher who was arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself.-Life:Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng , Shandong province, only thirty kilometres ...
10.1/51/13)
The copular verb (shì) of Literary and Modern Chinese dates from the Han period.
In Old Chinese the word was a near demonstrative
Demonstrative
In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...
("this").
As in Modern Chinese, but unlike most Tibeto-Burman languages, the basic word order in a verbal sentence was subject–verb–object:
孟 子 見 梁 惠 王 *mraŋs tsəjʔ kens C-rjaŋ wets wjaŋ Mencius see Liang Hui king
"Mencius saw King Hui of Liang." (MenciusMenciusMencius was a Chinese philosopher who was arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself.-Life:Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng , Shandong province, only thirty kilometres ...
1.1/1/3)
Besides inversions for emphasis, there were two exceptions to this rule: a pronoun object of a negated sentence or an interrogative pronoun object would be placed before the verb:
歲 不 我 與 *swjats pjə ŋajʔ ljaʔ year not me wait
"The years do not wait for us." (Analects 17.1/47/23)
An additional noun phrase could be placed before the subject to serve as the topic.
As in the modern language, yes/no questions were formed by adding a sentence-final particle, and requests for information by substituting an interrogative pronoun for the requested element.
In general, Old Chinese modifiers preceded the words they modified.
Thus relative clause
Relative clause
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
s were placed before the noun, usually marked by the particle *tjə 之 (in a role similar to Modern Chinese 的 de):
不 忍 人 之 心 *pjə njənʔ njin tjə sjəm not endure person P heart
"... the heart that cannot bear the afflictions of others." (MenciusMenciusMencius was a Chinese philosopher who was arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself.-Life:Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng , Shandong province, only thirty kilometres ...
3.6/18/4)
A common instance of this construction was adjectival modification, since the Old Chinese adjective was a type of verb (as on the modern language), but 之 was usually omitted after monosyllabic adjectives.
Similarly, adverbial modifiers, including various forms of negation, usually occurred before the verb.
As in the modern language, time adjunct
Adjunct (grammar)
In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or structurally dispensable, part of a sentence that, when removed, will not affect the remainder of the sentence except to discard from it some auxiliary information...
s occurred either at the start of the sentence or before the verb, depending on their scope, while duration adjuncts were placed after the verb.
Instrumental and place adjuncts were usually placed after the verb phrase.
These later moved to a position before the verb, as in the modern language.
External links
- "Book Review: The Roots of Old Chinese", review of by Axel Schuessler.
- "Laurent Sagart : The Roots of Old Chinese", review of by Marc Miyake.
- "Review of Axel Schuessler's ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese", review of by Georgiy StarostinGeorgiy StarostinGeorgiy Sergeevich Starostin is a Russian linguistics researcher at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and a participant at the Santa Fe Institute's Evolution of Human Languages project...
.