> But there was a time when writing in Mandarin was a radical new idea and people were unsure how to write many things, e.g. whether to use 的, 底 or 之 for the ge

> But there was a time when writing in Mandarin was a radical new idea and people were unsure how to write many things, e.g. whether to use 的, 底 or 之 for the genitive particle de. The advent of writing in Mandarin has a long and gradual history, starting from the Three Kingdoms onwards. There was some orthographic variation, but nothing too crazy (in fact I'd wager that 80 to 90% of the Song written Mandarin vernacular can be read by a modern Mandarin reader with an hour or two of preparation, probably even Tang). The radical idea of the 20th century was to effectively abolish Classical Chinese, rather than start writing in the vernacular ab initio.