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nd spring and autumn periods similarly the chu ci provides rhyme data for the dialect spoken in the chu region during the warring states period these rhymes together with clues from the phonetic components of xingsheng characters allow most characters attested in old chinese to be assigned to one of 30 or 31 rhyme groups for late old chinese of the han period the modern southern min languages the oldest layer of sino vietnamese vocabulary and a few early transliterations of foreign proper names as well as names for non native flora and fauna also provide insights into language reconstruction although many of the finer details remain unclear most scholars agree that old chinese differed from middle chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort and in having voiceless nasals and liquids most recent reconstructions also describe old chinese as a language without tones but having consonant clusters at the end of the syllable which developed into tone distinctions in middle chinese most researchers trace the core vocabulary of old chinese to sino tibetan with much early borrowing from neighbouring languages during the zhou period the originally monosyllabic vocabulary was augmented with polysyllabic words formed by compounding and reduplication although monosyllabic vocabulary was still predominant unlike middle chinese and the modern chinese languages old chinese had a significant amount of derivational morphology several affixes have been identified including ones for the verbification of nouns conversion between transitive and intransitive verbs and formation of causative verbs 4 like modern chinese it appears to be uninflected though a pronoun case and number system seems to have existed during the shang and early zhou but was already in the process of disappearing by the classical period 5 likewise by the classical period most morphological derivations had become unproductive or vestigial and grammatical relationships were primarily indicated using word order and grammatical particles classification edit middle chinese and its southern neighbours kra dai hmong mien and the vietic branch of austroasiatic 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 6 7 the most widely accepted hypothesis is that chinese belongs to the sino tibetan language family together with burmese tibetan and many other languages spoken in the himalayas and the southeast asian massif 8 the evidence consists of some hundreds of proposed cognate words 9 including such basic vocabulary as the following 10 sino tibetan cognates meaning old chinese b old tibetan old burmese i 吾 ŋa 12 ṅa 13 ṅā 13 you 汝 njaʔ 14 naṅ 15 not 無 mja 16 ma 13 ma 13 two 二 njijs 17 gñis 18 nhac nhik 18 three 三 sum 19 gsum 20 sumḥ 20 five 五 ŋaʔ 21 lṅa 13 ṅāḥ 13 six 六 c rjuk c 23 drug 20 khrok khruk 20 sun 日 njit 24 ñi ma 25 niy 25 name 名 mjeŋ 26 myiṅ myeŋ 27 maññ miŋ 27 ear 耳 njəʔ 28 rna 29 nāḥ 29 joint 節 tsik 30 tshigs 25 chac chik 25 fish 魚 ŋja 31 ña ṅʲa 13 ṅāḥ 13 bitter 苦 kʰaʔ 32 kha 13 khāḥ 13 kill 殺 srjat 33 sad 34 sat 34 poison 毒 duk 35 dug 20 tok tuk 20 although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted reconstruction of sino tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as indo european or austronesian 36 although old chinese is by far the earliest attested member of the family its logographic script does not clearly indicate the pronunciation of words 37 other difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages the lack of inflection in many of them and the effects of language contact in addition many of the smaller languages are poorly described because they are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach including several sensitive border zones 38 39 initial consonants generally correspond regarding place and manner of articulation but voicing and aspiration are much less regular and prefixal elements vary widely between languages some researchers believe that both these phenomena reflect lost minor syllables 40 41 proto tibeto burman as reconstructed by benedict and matisoff lacks an aspiration distinction on initial stops and affricates aspiration in old chinese often corresponds to pre initial consonants in tibetan and lolo burmese and is believed to be a chinese innovation arising from earlier prefixes 42 proto sino tibetan is reconstructed with a six vowel system as in recent reconstructions of old chinese with the tibeto burman languages distinguished by the merger of the mid central vowel ə with a 43 44 the other vowels are preserved by both with some alternation between e and i and between o and u 45 texts edit timeline of early chinese history and available texts c 1250 bc late shang oracle bones short bronze inscriptions c 1046 bc western zhou bronze inscriptions early shu documents shi poetry i ching 771 bc spring and autumn period annals later shu bronze inscriptions 476 bc warring states period received classic texts excavated texts 221 bc qin unification the earliest known written records of the chinese language were found at the yinxu site near modern anyang identified as the last capital of the shang dynasty and date from about 1250 bc 46 these are the oracle bones short inscriptions carved on turtle plastrons and ox scapulae 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 names 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 particles than classical chinese 47 from early in the western zhou period around 1000 bc the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions many of considerable length 48 these texts are found throughout the zhou area 49 although their language changed over time it was highly uniform across this range at each point in time suggesting that it reflected the prestige form used by the zhou elite 50 even longer pre classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition the oldest sections of the book of documents the classic of poetry 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 48 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 51 52 there are many bronze inscriptions from this period but they are vastly outweighed by a rich literature written in ink on bamboo and wooden slips and toward the end of the period silk although these are perishable materials a significant number of texts were transmitted as copies and a few of these survived to the present day as the received classics works from this period including the analects the mencius and the commentary of zuo have been admired as models of prose style by later generations 52 as a result the syntax and vocabulary of old chinese was preserved in literary chinese wenyan the standard for formal writing in china and neighboring sinosphere countries until the early 20th century 53 54 script edit shang dynasty oracle bone script on an ox scapula main article chinese characters each character of the script represented a single old chinese morpheme originally identical to a word most scholars believe that these words were monosyllabic 55 william baxter and laurent sagart propose that some words consisted of a minor syllable followed by a full syllable as in modern khmer but still written with a single character 56 the development of characters to signify the words of the language follows the same three stages that characterized egyptian hieroglyphs mesopotamian cuneiform script and the maya script 57 58 some words could be represented by pictures later stylized such as 日 rì sun 人 rén person and 木 mù tree wood by abstract symbols such as 三 sān three and 上 shàng up or by composite symbols such as 林 lín forest two trees about 1 000 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 of 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 59 60 next words that could not be represented pictorially such as abstract terms and grammatical particles were signified by borrowing characters of pictorial origin representing similar sounding words the rebus strategy 61 62 the word lì tremble was originally written with the character 栗 for lì chestnut 63 the pronoun and modal particle qí was written with the character 其 originally representing jī winnowing basket 64 sometimes the borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original as with 毋 wú don t a borrowing of 母 mǔ mother 59 later phonetic loans were systematically disambiguated by the addition of semantic indicators usually to the less common word the word lì tremble was later written with the character 慄 formed by adding the symbol 忄 a variant of 心 xīn heart 63 the less common original word jī winnowing basket came to be written with the compound 箕 obtained by adding the symbol 竹 zhú bamboo to the character 64 such phono semantic compound characters were already used extensively on the oracle bones and the vast majority of characters created since then have been of this type 65 in the shuowen jiezi a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century 82 of the 9 353 characters are classified as phono semantic compounds 66 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 67 68 guodian chu slips c 300 bc with transcriptions in modern characters these developments were already present in the oracle bone script 69 possibly implying a significant period of development prior to the extant inscriptions 55 this may have involved writing on perishable materials as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character 冊 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 70 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 71 the language developed compound words though almost all constituent morphemes could also 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 72 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 73 phonology edit main articles old chinese phonology and reconstructions of old chinese old chinese phonology has been reconstructed using a unique method relying on textual sources the starting point is the qieyun dictionary 601 ad which classifies the reading pronunciation of each character found in texts to that time within a precise but abstract phonological system scholars have sought to assign phonetic values to these middle chinese categories by comparing them with modern varieties of chinese sino xenic pronunciations and transcriptions 74 next the phonology of old chinese is reconstructed by comparing the qieyun categories to the rhyming practice of the classic of poetry early 1st millennium bc and the shared phonetic components of chinese characters some of which are slightly older 75 more recent efforts have supplemented this method with evidence from old chinese derivational morphology from chinese varieties preserving distinctions not found in the qieyun such as min and waxiang and from early transcriptions and loans 76 although many details are still disputed recent formulations are in substantial agreement on the core issues 77 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 78 79 80 reconstructed old chinese initial consonants labial dental palatal d velar laryngeal plain sibilant plain labialized plain labialized stop or affricate voiceless p t ts k kʷ ʔ ʔʷ aspirate pʰ tʰ tsʰ kʰ kʷʰ voiced b d dz ɡ ɡʷ nasal voiceless m̥ n̥ ŋ̊ ŋ̊ʷ voiced m n ŋ ŋʷ lateral voiceless l̥ voiced l fricative or approximant voiceless r̥ s j̊ h hʷ voiced r z j ɦ w various initial clusters have been proposed especially clusters of s with other consonants but this area remains unsettled 82 bernhard karlgren and many later scholars posited the medials r j and the combination rj to explain the retroflex and palatal obstruents of middle chinese as well as many of its vowel contrasts 83 r is generally accepted however although the distinction denoted by j is universally accepted its realization as a palatal glide has been challenged on a number of grounds and a variety of different realizations have been used in recent constructions 84 85 reconstructions since the 1980s usually propose six vowels 86 e f old chinese vowels front central back close i u mid e ə o open a vowels could optionally be followed by the same codas as in middle chinese a glide j or w a nasal m n or ŋ or a stop p t or k some scholars also allow for a labiovelar coda kʷ 90 most scholars now believe that old chinese lacked the tones found in later stages of the language but had optional post codas ʔ and s which developed into the middle chinese rising and departing tones respectively 91 grammar edit see also classical chinese 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 has been extensively analysed 92 having no inflection old chinese was heavily reliant on word order grammatical particles and inherent word classes 92 93 word classes edit 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 ...