Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese using grammar and vocabulary very different from any modern spoken form of Chinese. Classical Chinese was used for almost all formal correspondence before the 20th century, not only in China but also in Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Among Chinese speakers, classical Chinese has been largely replaced by Vernacular Chinese (baihua), a style of writing that is much closer to modern spoken Chinese, while speakers of non-Chinese languages have largely abandoned Classical Chinese in favor of local vernaculars.

Pronunciation

Chinese characters are not alphabetic and do not reflect sound changes, and the actual pronunciation of Old Chinese can only be tentatively reconstructed and is unknown outside linguistic circles. As a result, Classical Chinese has no universally fixed way of pronunciation. When reading wenyan, the Chinese characters are generally read with the pronunciations of the reader's own variety of Chinese, such as modern Mandarin or Cantonese. Other varieties of Chinese, such as Southern Min, have a special set of pronunciation used for Classical Chinese or vocabulary and usage borrowed from Classical Chinese. Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese readers of Classical Chinese use systems of pronunciation specific to their own languages. For example, Japanese speakers use On'yomi and (more rarely) Kunyomi, which are the ways kanji, or Chinese characters, are read when they are used to write in Japanese. Kunten, a system that aids Japanese speakers with Classical Chinese word order, was also used.

Related Topics:
Chinese character - Alphabet - Sound change - Old Chinese - Mandarin - Cantonese - Southern Min - Korean - Japanese - Vietnamese - Kanji - Kunten

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Since the pronunciation of Old Chinese or other forms of historical Chinese (such as Middle Chinese) have long been lost, characters which once rhymed in poetry often no longer do, or vice versa. Poetry and other rhyme-based writing thus becomes less coherent than the original reading must have been. However, some other modern Chinese dialects adhere more closely to the original pronunciations, as evident by the preservation of rhyme structures. Some Chinese speakers thus believe wenyan literature, especially poetry, sounds better when read with a southern dialect such as Cantonese or Southern Min.

Related Topics:
Middle Chinese - Rhyme - Chinese dialect

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Another phenomenon that is common in reading Classical Chinese is homophony, or words that sound the same. More than 2500 years of sound change separates Classical Chinese from any modern language or dialect, so when reading Classical Chinese in any modern variety of Chinese (especially Mandarin) or in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese, many characters which originally had different pronunciations have become homonyms, making it impossible to orally communicate using Classical Chinese. There is a famous Classical Chinese essay written in the early 20th-century by linguist Y. R. Chao called the Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den which illustrates this. It is perfectly comprehensible when read, but contains only words that are now pronounced "shi" in Mandarin. In addition, literary Chinese, by its very nature as a written language employing an logographic writing system, can often get away with the use of homophones that even in oral Old Chinese would not have been distinguishable in any way.

Related Topics:
Homophony - Sound change - Homonym - Y. R. Chao - Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den - Logographic

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The situation is analogous with some English words that sound the same, such as "meet" and "meat". These two words were pronounced {{IPA|/meːt/}} and {{IPA|/mɛːt/}} (akin to modern "mate" and "met") respectively during the time of Chaucer, as evident by spelling. Today they sound the same, but are distinguished by spelling. English spelling is only a few centuries old and was in its original form a sound-based system, so such examples are not very common; the Chinese writing system is, by contrast, several thousand years old and logographic, so such examples are commonplace and exist for nearly all characters.

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