Classical Chinese and Colloquial Chinese 文言文和白话文

Classical Chinese and Colloquial Chinese文言文和白话文

Both classical Chinese and colloquial Chinese are written languages. Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese, originated in ancient China, and was popular in East Asia. Literary Chinese is known as kanbun in Japanese, hanmun or gugyeol in Korean, and cổ văn or văn ngôn in Vietnamese. Nowadays, classical Chinese is a dead language, as nobody uses it anymore except historians and archaeologists.

Some linguists thought that classical Chinese represented ancient Chinese people’s spoken languages, and that it gradually separated from the spoken language. That is a theory without evidence. Classical Chinese is separated from any kind of spoken language, because it is a clipped way of writing, which is similar to writing a telegraph message. Sending a telegram was generally charged by the number of letters. To save money, people typically wrote their telegrams in a very compressed style.

Ancient Chinese people wrote characters on bamboo slips with a brush-pen. That was a time-consuming work. To save time, they had to pack as much information into the smallest possible number of characters. This is classical Chinese.

At present, Chinese people write colloquial Chinese, or modern Chinese. The colloquial must use symbols correlated to one’s spoken sounds. Otherwise it is not a colloquial language.

Although the Chinese characters in the colloquial are the same as those in the classical, they correlated to the spoken sounds. The Chinese characters in the Classical represent concepts in one’s mind directly.

Some linguists believe that Chinese characters are logograms. This statement is incorrect.

Chinese characters in modern Chinese are phonetic symbols.

For example: 东西means something instead of east and west. 马上means immediately instead of  on horseback.

Modern written language, or modern writing systems, including Chinese are all colloquial. The problem with colloquial Chinese is that many Chinese characters correlate to a spoken sound. If one Chinese character correlates to a spoken sound, the Chinese characters are equivalent to Kana, syllabic scripts in Japanese language.

文言文和白话文

文言文和白话文都是文字。文言文也叫古文。文言文起源于中国，曾经流行于东亚地区。文言文，日文叫kanbun，朝鲜文叫hanmun或者gugyeol，越南文叫cổvăn古文或vănngôn文言。现在文言文是死文字，除了研究历史和考古的人，已经没有人使用文言文了。

有的语言学家认为文言文代表古代汉语，后来才慢慢分离。这是没有根据的理论。文言文脱离所有的口语，因为它是压缩式写作，类似于发电报。发电报一般按照字的数量收费。为了省钱，人们通常把他们的电报的文字数量压缩到最少。

古代中国人用毛笔在竹简上写字，这是一个非常耗时的工作。为了节省时间，他们只能把一篇文章使用汉字的数量压缩到最少，这是中国的文言文。

中国人现在使用白话文。白话文一定要使用和你说话的声音有大致对应关系的符号，否则就不是白话文。虽然白话文里的汉字和文言文里的汉字是一样的，它们代表说话的声音。文言文里的汉字直接代表大脑里的概念。

有的语言学家认为汉字是表意符号，这种说法不正确。白话文里的汉字是表音符号。例如：东西，意思不是东和西，是东西。马上，意思不是在马背上，而是立刻。

现代的文字，包括中文在内，都是白话文。现代中文的问题是一个声音对应很多汉字。如果一个声音只对应一个汉字，白话文里的汉字就相当于日文的假名。