Does the Chinese written language over get too "old"?

[Speedy9199]

Hello I am new here.

It is well known that any language tends to change every 100 years or so, speaking it and its writing. The thing is, Chinese characters are not phonetic and Chinese does not have much sentence structure. I have looked at old chinese documents online to see what they are like and even knowing 500+ characters I can still recognize the characters and understand some to most of it. So then I went further back into time and still could read some/most of it. Then I went 1000 years into the past and I could still recognize the characters. Of course there are some characters I did not recognize but thats to be expected even in modern chinese but overall you can still understand some of what is being written. Is there some point in history that Chinese writing is unreadable? If so at what year?

[skylee]

Perhaps 220BC or earlier, ie before the first emperor standardised the script?

[Hofmann]

Most old texts are transcribed into a modern (i.e. 楷書) script, even though at the time the standard script may have been something else. This is the case with most texts from Han and before.

[renzhe]

The thing is, Chinese characters are not phonetic and Chinese does not have much sentence structure.

Why do you say this? I would strongly disagree with both of these statements.

That said, the main factor is the switch from Classical Chinese (文言文), used in dynastic China, to modern vernacular writing (白话) used today. Classical Chinese is grammatically a different language, vocabulary is quite different, and many characters have different meanings than we're used to.

The main shift from Classical Chinese to vernacular occurred in 1920s, but vernacular writing was already used in the 14th century (Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms). Even such old written vernacular is typically no problem for native speakers. At the same time, most of them will struggle with 19th century stuff written in Classical Chinese.

[OneEye]

Chinese characters are not phonetic

Come again?

Anyway, once you get further along in learning Chinese, you'll find that in fact, you can't read things written before the 白話 movement without learning some 文言文. You may be able to take a stab at the meaning, but you won't actually be reading it. More like guessing it. Kind of like when I see a text in Japanese with lots of kanji.

[liuzhou]

It is well known that any language tends to change every 100 years or so, speaking it and its writing.

Is it?

The thing is, Chinese characters are not phonetic and Chinese does not have much sentence structure.

Er. Start again.

[Speedy9199]

What I mean by not phonetic is that it's not like an alphabet. Also what I mean by Chinese not having much sentence structure is that you can write things in not a certain order and what you write can still be understandable, which I have found when writing Chinese. Many other languages you can't do this. I know there a some rules that still apply to chinese but not many it seems.

[OneEye]

Keep studying, and get back to us on that.

For the record, "understandable" is not the same as "correct". "I go store buy milk. Give money?" That sentence is more or less understandable, but it's far from correct. You don't want to write or speak like this in Chinese.

[daofeishi]

Also what I mean by Chinese not having much sentence structure is that you can write things in not a certain order and what you write can still be understandable, which I have found when writing Chinese

All languages can convey information with a minimum of ambiguity while still being flexible enough to say anything you want. Essentially all languages have just the amount of structure they need, neither more or less. There is no language out there that "lacks" structure, not even Chinese.

That structure can manifest itself in many ways. Many languages have a lot of morphology, i.e. verbs changing based on tenses and nouns changing based on cases. Those languages tend to have a very flexible syntax. Other languages have less syntax, but generally tend to make up for it in terms of morphology. (There is even some empirical evidence that languages generally undergo a cyclical shift from one end of the scale to the other. This is called the grammaticalization cycle.) Chinese falls into the latter category. It doesn't have much morphology, but it sure makes up for it in terms of syntax. Chinese is actually fairly rigid in terms of how you can phrase a sentence. You can't interchange subject and object, or move time clauses wherever you want them to be. If you study a case-heavy language like Finnish, you'll find that you often can rearrange almost every single term in the sentence while keeping it grammatical. You can't do that in Chinese.

Bottom line: Chinese has exactly the structure it needs, and when it does change it does so through small incremental changes in how native speakers choose to use their language, not by the language hitting a "due date". That change happens slowly and gradually; 100 years is not nearly enough to create any dramatic change. 100 years is within the combined lifespan of 3 generations, and you certainly don't speak your language very differently from your grandfather.

Furthermore, the way language is represented on paper has little to nothing to do with how the language develops. Writing systems develop in order to reflect how people speak and think, not the other way around, and if the writing system needs to change in order to reflect shifts in how people use the language, it does. If you want to predict how Chinese will develop, you don't study the characters. You study the substance of the language: its phonetic inventory, its vocabulary and its grammar.

[renzhe]

That change happens slowly and gradually; 100 years is not nearly enough to create any dramatic change. 100 years is within the combined lifespan of 3 generations, and you certainly don't speak your language very differently from your grandfather.

I agree with most of your post, but in this case, it really depends on the availability of a written standard.

For example, I've heard that Shanghainese kids speak very differently from their grandparents. Languages change very fast if not reigned in by a standard -- written language tends to slow this process down considerably. Just think how quickly Latin degenerated into all the Romance languages, and how slowly these languages have changed since a written standard was established for each one of them.

However, since the topic is written language, you're right.

[renzhe]

Also what I mean by Chinese not having much sentence structure is that you can write things in not a certain order and what you write can still be understandable, which I have found when writing Chinese. Many other languages you can't do this.

I think that you got that backwards.

In Croatian, for example, you can pretty rearrange a sentence in almost any order, and it would be grammatically correct and mean the same thing. Chinese is extremely strict in terms of word order.

[smurese]

@Speedy, in trying to answer your original question, without getting into your other statements about the Chinese language... Since you say "I went 1000 years into the past and I could still recognize the characters", I guess maybe 1000 years is not that long in the history of Chinese writing. At around 1000 AD, that would be just after the Tang Dynasty and before the Mongolian Kublai Khan established the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, completing his grandfather's mission (Genghis Khan). Including the Tang Dynasty, there are recorded many more than five highly literate dynasties before that, hence writing would also have been quite developed in those earlier periods.

If you're talking about the evolution of Chinese script styles, then even if you go as far back as the Clerical Script 2000 years ago during the Han Dynasty (rather than just 1000 years), you are still likely to recognize many, if not most, of the characters. Going back further, we have:

- Seal Script, can be traced back to even before the so called First Emperor, Qin Shihuang of the Qin Dynasty - in fact around a couple of centuries before Qin, towards the end of the preceding Zhou Dynasty; so that's as early as around 400 BC. If you can read the wiggly characters on traditional Chinese chops/seals, then you can start to grasp Chinese script two and a half millenia ago (give or take a couple of centuries! You might not be able to do the same going back in history for any other language.)

- Bronze Script began evolving from the Shang Dynasty (over 3000 years ago, the Chinese dynasty regarded as the first one by archaeological evidence), and then developed and matured through the next Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 BC).

- The oldest collection of Chinese script is the Oracle Script, which were characters carved into bones and shells and burned for the telling of fortunes. They have been found to come from the latter half of of the Shang Dynasty, some earlier than 1200 BC - so that's over 3200 years ago. Not even scholars can read all these characters, so most of it (if not just about all of it) would be unreadable by someone studying modern Chinese.

There are links here where you can have a look at the scripts yourself and figure out how much of it you can recognize. The Omniglot website has nice examples and a summary. Chineseetymology.org has many more examples for each character, and a more detailed treatment of the History of Chinese Writing. (These two sources were found on this webpage about the "Etymology, Origins and the Evolution of the Basic Components of Chinese Characters".)

Wikipedia also has a short treatment on its Chinese Characters page.

So when do the scripts start to be practically unreadable for you?