The language of Old
Chinese, which roughly corresponds to the period of 600 BCE- 0 CE
became the standard grammar and script for Literary Chinese. The
great classical works of ancient China including the Analects of
Confucius 論語
and Sun Tzu’s Art of War 兵法
were written using this language. As the spoken
language changed, Old Chinese served as a kind of standard from which
a strictly written form of Chinese organically evolved, thus
preserving in much detail the grammar of Old Chinese. Literary
Chinese went on to serve as the official written language outside of
China in places such as Korea, Vietnam and Japan.
Before delving into
grammar of the language itself, we first need to examine the written
script which, in itself, conveys meaning in its own right.
The origins of
Chinese characters can be found in pictographs written on various
materials dating back into pre-history. These symbols usually
depicted the message they conveyed, or tried to use combinations of
symbols to convey more abstract ideas. These symbols were said to
have been systematized by the Yellow Emperor 黃帝
in ancient times. The characters were later catalogued and
their calligraphy forms fixed by the grand recorder Chou in the year
800 B.C.
Around this time
characters were still being drawn with a pen-like instrument, but
over time it was replaced with the brush, which came to make Chinese
characters what we know them as today.
There
a six categories of characters. The first character class is called
imitative drafts, which are rough sketches representing the object.
山
mountain
水
water
人
person
三
three
The second category is indicative symbols. They are figures that
suggest the meaning. These symbols often suggest an idea of motion.
ノ
action of the authority which exerts itself up
and down
The third category is logical aggregates which are made up of two or
more characters made simple, coming together as one. Their
signification results from the meanings of the various parts.
占 fortune
telling;ト>divination
+ 口>mouth;
to consult fortune tellers.
The fourth category
is phonetic complexes, which are made up of two or more simple
characters. One character conveys meaning, while the other one holds
no meaning but conveys the pronunciation. One should note that the
pronunciation element is no longer absolute in the modern day as the
phonology of Chinese morphemes has changed considerably.
楚 a
woody land; 林>forest
+ 疋
phonetic ‘chu’1
The fifth category is the acceptation of the character in a meaning
more extended, derived, generalized, metaphorical, analogous,
adapted, figurative, etc.
网
a fishing net. By extension it can refer to a
network, cobweb, reticulate design; to catch with a net, to catch in
general, to gather, etc. All these meanings are an extension from a
concrete object.
The sixth and final
category refers to ‘mistake characters’ which are characters with
false borrowings. Sometimes these came to exist because of scribal
errors, or more commonly on account of assigning an existing
character to an idea, place or person that at the time held no
character.
The meanings of
many characters over time have shifted and often differ greatly from
their original meanings. Moreover, other languages which adopted
Chinese characters came to assign different meanings to characters.
An example would be the character 使
which in the Confucian Analects means, ‘to
make someone do [something]’/ causative. In modern day Japanese,
the character is a verb which means ‘to use’.
It should also be
noted that readers of languages that use Chinese characters do not
read nor come to directly understand the meaning of characters
through their archaic semantic elements. While these semantics
elements help as memory aid they are by no means absolute in
conveying meaning. Each character represents a word. These characters
are graphic representations of ideas which are further represented by
a vocalized utterance associated with each particular symbol. In some
ways, they are not that different from something like roman script,
only that they are more immediately derived from their pictographic
roots.
Literary Chinese is
essentially a terse monosyllabic language following the general
Subject-Verb-Object pattern. One character refers to one syllable,
which refers to one word, though there are a few exceptions.
人
person/populace/man/human
去
to depart/leave/go
芙蓉
lotus (the individual characters mean nothing on
their own)
Literary Chinese
uses two-word compounds. These compound words work as one single noun
within the syntax of a sentence. It makes use of a process called
reduplication. This is a process where repeating a word creates a
meaning extended significantly beyond the meaning of the original
word.
人
person 人人
all people
年
year 年年
year after year
Literary Chinese
uses polar binomes where a pair of words (synonyms or opposites) came
together to refer to a whole set of things as a single compound noun.
少長
young + old > people of all ages
動静
move + be still > all [one’s] activities
草木
grasses + trees > all vegetation
Pluralization of
words is accomplished with affixation. These are suffixed or prefixed
onto nouns, or any other word class that behaves as a noun within the
syntax of a sentence.
Literary Chinese,
like most languages, uses the topic-comment sentence. The topic is
what you want to talk about, and the comment is what you want to say
about it. Literary Chinese has two types of comments and two
corresponding types of sentences: the nominal and the verbal. These
are distinguished in that a nominal sentence has a noun phrase as its
comment and a verbal sentence has a verb phrase as its comment.
The nominal
sentence is essentially a statement of identity. For example:
A, B 也 A
is a type of B.
宋、小國也 Song
is a small state. [Song, small state it is]
無父無君、是禽獸也
With no father and no ruler: this is a wild
animal. [no father no ruler, this wild animal it is]
The verbal comment
is a nominalized verb following the pattern verb + 也.
Verbs serving as topics are nominalized, as all topics are nouns.
When verbs serve as nominal comments, they refer to a general
category of action that defines the identity of the topic. Modern
English does not have this kind of structure. Observe the following
sentence:
王之不王、不爲也 The
King’s not ruling (correctly) is a matter of not trying. [King’s
(王之)
not ruling, not try it is.]
Note that the
character 王
(king) functions as a verb by virtue of the
negation particle 不.
All nouns following 不
become verbs, though there are at times
exceptions. In this sense the word 'king' becomes a verb meaning
‘kingly way/actions of a king’, and from the context of the
sentence one can gather it means ‘not being kingly’. The later
half is where we find the copula 也following
the verb: to try 爲,
which is negated by 不.
One should also
observe that quite frequently in Literary Chinese the tense is
usually not explicitly mentioned. The reader is assumed to gather
from the context of the sentences when in time the action took place.
However, in
Literary Chinese, as in any language, one must create sequences of
actions if one wants to tell a story or make an argument, and for
this reason Literary Chinese uses coordinate verbs to mark the
sequence of events. The first verb in a sentence is typically the
antecedent condition. It influences how the second action occurs or
if it occurs hypothetically or not at all. Observe:
宋 人 有 耕 者、 田 中 有 株、兔 走 觸 株 折 頸 而 死
Song
Person Exits Plow AN2
Field Inside Exists Stump, Rabbit Run Strike
Stump Broke Neck and/then Die
Here 有
is a transitive verb of 'existential
predication': it says that its direct object exists. When有
has a topic it generally indicates a general,
though not precisely specific, time. “There exists in the people of
Song one who plows” and “Within the field there is a stump.”
Note that the direct object of all normal transitive verbs comes
after the verb.
The later half of
the sentence reads, “The rabbit ran, struck the stump, broke its
neck [and as a result而]
died.” The而
explicitly indicates coordination between two
verbs:
A而B
= A and [as a result] B.
A question arises
as to how a native speaker of Old Chinese would have perceived the
sentence. Is the narration in the present? The rabbit strikes the
stump and dies. Or is it in the past? The rabbit struck the stump and
died. It is not explicit which tense is being used. An English
speaker might expect it to be in the past tense. Though there is the
possibility that the notion of an exact tense did not exist in the
narrative speech in Old Chinese.
Another interesting
semantic feature of Literary Chinese is its use of the particle 所.
It is a particle that points to the object, without explicitly naming
it. It is the label that allows one to refer to a set of objects
selected simply for their role as objects of verbs. Observe:
李 子 往 市
Li Master
Go Market
Master Li went to the market.
李 子 所 往 市 也
Li Master
>object< Go Market It is
Where master Li went was the market.
In the first
sentence we do not know where the emphasis is placed. In the second
sentence the Verb-Object has been split, and the verb has been
shifted into being the topic. Naturally, the comment about the topic
follows: the market. Observe the following interrogative sentence:
李 子 所 往 何 也
Li Master >object<
Go What/Where? It is
Where is it that Master Li went?
This article has
hardly touched the surface of Literary Chinese, but hopefully it has
provided the reader with an idea of how fascinating both the grammar
and script is. Indeed, the history of the language runs from
ancient China until even the modern day. It holds many qualities
which should be of interest to any person interested in linguistics.
Further Reading:
Fuller, Michael. An
Introduction to Literary Chinese.
Cambride: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Pulleyblank, Edwin
G. Outline of Classical
Chinese Grammar.
Vancouver:
UBC Press, 1995.
Wieger, S.J. Chinese
Characters: their origin, etymology, history, classification and
signification.
Trans. L. Davrout. New York: Paragon, 1965.
Notes:
There is an apocryphal Buddhist sūtra in Chinese entitled the Buddha Teaches the Sūtra on Cause and Effect in the Three Times 佛說三世因果經. The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas has their translation of it here.
