Classical Chinese grammar

Classical Chinese grammar is the grammar of Classical Chinese, a language register which has certain characteristics which are quite different from many languages, especially ones with highly marked inflectional morphologies, and also compares and contrasts with the various particular grammars of modern vernacular Chinese, in various ways.

Grammar

Classical Chinese is distinguished from written vernacular Chinese in its style, which appears extremely concise and compact to modern Chinese speakers, and to some extent in the use of different lexical items (vocabulary). An essay in Classical Chinese, for example, might use half as many Chinese characters as in vernacular Chinese to relate the same content.

In terms of conciseness and compactness, Classical Chinese rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are of one syllable only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Chinese dialects, in which two-syllable words are extremely common. This phenomenon exists, in part, because polysyllabic words evolved in Chinese to disambiguate homophones that result from sound changes. Similarly, Chinese has acquired many polysyllabic words in order to disambiguate monosyllabic words that sounded different in earlier forms of Chinese but identical in one region or another during later periods. Because Classical Chinese is based on the literary examples of ancient Chinese literature, it has almost none of the two-syllable words present in modern Chinese languages.

Pronouns

Classical Chinese has more pronouns compared to the modern vernacular. In particular, whereas Mandarin has one general character to refer to the first-person pronoun ("I"/"me"), Literary Chinese has several, many of which are used as part of honorific language (see Chinese honorifics), and several of which have different grammatical uses (first-person collective, first-person possessive, etc.).

Syntax

In syntax, Classical Chinese is always ready to drop subjects, verbs, objects, etc. when their meaning is understood (pragmatically inferable). Also, words are not restrictively categorized into parts of speech: nouns used as verbs, adjectives used as nouns, and so on. There is no copula in Classical Chinese, "是" (pinyin: shì) is a copula in modern Chinese but in old Chinese it was originally a near demonstrative ("this"); the modern Chinese for "this" is "這" (pinyin: zhè).

Word order

The Classical Chinese word order is often the reverse of Mandarin; for example, Mandarin 饒恕 (pinyin: ráoshù, "forgive") is Classical 恕饒).^{[1] [2]}

See also

• Chinese adjectives
• Chinese grammar
• Chinese particles
• Chinese pronouns
• Chinese verbs
• Classical Chinese
• Classical Chinese lexicon
• Vernacular Chinese

Sources

• 《新高中文言手册》 （1998年 北京华书）
• 《新华字典》 （第10版）

Further reading

• Abel Rémusat (1822). Élémens de la grammaire chinoise, ou, Principes généraux du kou-wen ou style antique: et du kouan-hoa c'est-à-dire, de la langue commune généralement usitée dans l'Empire chinois. PARIS: Imprimerie Royale. p. 214. Retrieved 2011-05-15.  (Original from Harvard University)
• Stimson, Hugh M. (1976). Fifty-five T'ang Poems. Far Eastern Publications: Yale University. ISBN 0-88710-026-0
• Frederick William Baller, China Inland Mission (1912). Lessons in elementary Wen-li. China Inland Mission. p. 128. Retrieved 2011-05-15.  (Original from the University of California)
• Herrlee Glessner Creel, ed. (1952). Literary Chinese by the inductive method, Volume 2. University of Chicago Press. Retrieved 2011-05-15.  (Original from the University of Michigan)
• J. J. Brandt, Peking. College of Chinese Studies (1929). Wenli particles. The North China union language school. p. 172. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Michigan)
• J. J. Brandt (1973). Wenli particles. Vetch and Lee. p. 178. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Virginia)
• J. J. Brandt, Peking. College of Chinese Studies (1929). Wenli particles. The North China union language school. p. 172. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of California)
• Raymond Stanley Dawson (1968). An introduction to classical Chinese. Clarendon P. p. 127. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of California)
• Raymond Dawson (1968). An introduction to classical Chinese. Clarendon P. p. 127. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Virginia)
• Raymond Stanley Dawson (1968). An introduction to classical Chinese. Clarendon P. p. 127. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Michigan)
• Raymond Dawson (1977). An introduction to classical Chinese (reprint ed.). Clarendon Press. p. 127. ISBN 0-19-815451-8. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Michigan)
• Raymond Stanley Dawson (1984). A new introduction to classical Chinese (2, reprint ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 161. ISBN 0-19-815460-7. Retrieved 10 February 2012. ()
• J. J. Brandt (1936). Introduction to literary Chinese (2 ed.). H. Vetch. p. 352. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Michigan)
• J. J. Brandt, Peking. College of Chinese Studies (1929). Wenli particles. The North China union language school. p. 172. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Michigan)
• J. J. Brandt (1973). Wenli particles. Vetch and Lee. p. 178. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of Virginia)
• J. J. Brandt, Peking. College of Chinese Studies (1929). Wenli particles. The North China union language school. p. 172. Retrieved 10 February 2012. (the University of California)
• Stimson, Hugh M. (1976). Fifty-five T'ang Poems. Far Eastern Publications: Yale University. ISBN 0-88710-026-0

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: zh:文言

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Classical Chinese

• Chinese Notes: 古文入门 Introduction to Classical Chinese