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Yes, but AFAICT there are no reliable records of what people actually said in spoken Chinese in those ancient/classical eras. And thus it's quite meaningless to

by hnfong 3y ago

Yes, but AFAICT there are no reliable records of what people actually said in spoken Chinese in those ancient/classical eras. And thus it's quite meaningless to speculate about the evolution of the spoken Chinese languages* over that time scale... * note the plural -- while the written Chinese language was indeed the Lingua Franca of East Asia, the spoken language has regional differences culminating in the various regional Chinese spoken dialects/languages which are quite mutually unintelligible.

bloppe 3y ago
I wouldn't call it meaningless. Comparative linguistics can draw surprisingly strong conclusions about how languages sounded a long time ago, even ones that were never written down. There are hundreds of Chinese languages/dialects apparently descended from a common ancestor. That's enough for some serious comparative historical analysis. Anyway, expressiveness is not the same as complexity. It would seem Chinese was able to evolve a lot of expressiveness without adding too much unnecessary complexity, unlike more insular languages. The simplicity is also not exactly a firm rule, but a trend. Thanks for the interesting examples. Would love to learn more Chinese.