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The Seal script characters for "harvest" (later "year") and "person." A hypothesized pronunciation for each character may explain the resemblance. Notice the pharyngealized consonants.

Old Chinese (simplified Chinese: 上古汉语; traditional Chinese: 上古漢語; pinyin: shànggǔ hànyǔ), or Archaic Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese spoken from the Shang Dynasty (ended c. 1045 BC according to recent research), well into the Former Han Dynasty (206 BC to 9 AD). There are several distinct sub-periods within that long period of time. The term, in contrast to Middle Chinese and Modern Chinese, is usually used in historical Chinese phonology, which tries to reconstruct the way in which Old Chinese was pronounced.

Since Old Chinese was the language spoken by the Chinese when classical works such as the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and the Tao Te Ching were written, and was the official language of the unified empire of the Qin Dynasty and long-lasting Han Dynasty, Old Chinese was preserved for the following two millennia in the form of Classical Chinese, a style of written Chinese that emulates the grammar and vocabulary of Old Chinese as presented in those works. Classical Chinese was for two millennia the usual language used for official purposes in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. However, there is great variation within Classical Chinese, based mainly on when something was written, and the Classical Chinese of more recent writers, as well as that found outside of China, would probably be difficult for someone from Confucius's era to understand.

For the pronunciation of Classical Chinese, see Classical Chinese: Pronunciation

Since Chinese is written with logographic characters, not letters, it is not easy for the Chinese to notice that the sounds of a language change with time. The story of the reconstruction of Old Chinese began with the recitation of Shijing, the first and most revered collection of poetry in China. Generations of Chinese literati were baffled to find that many lines in Shijing didn't rhyme smoothly, being unaware that the sounds of the Chinese language had long changed. Scholars such as Zhu Xi suggested that the ancients had their own way of reciting poems: they would change the reading of a character temporarily to fit the rhyming scheme. Such a way of reciting or reading poetry is called xieyin (叶音 lit. "harmonizing the sound").

Jiao Hong (焦竑) and Chen Di (陈第/陳第) of the Ming Dynasty were the first persons to argue coherently that the lines in Shijing didn't rhyme just because the sounds had changed. The reconstruction of Old Chinese began when Gu Yanwu (顾炎武/顧炎武) of the Qing Dynasty divided the sounds of Old Chinese into 10 rime groups (韵部 yunbu). Other Qing scholars followed Gu's steps, refining the division. The Swedish sinologist, Bernhard Karlgren, was the first person to reconstruct Old Chinese with Latin alphabet (not IPA).

The sounds of Old Chinese are difficult to reconstruct, because the way the Chinese writing system indicates pronunciation is much less clear than the way an alphabet does. Scholars who try to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese have to rely on indirect evidence. They heavily rely on those rhymed pre-Qin texts, chiefly Shijing, and the fact that characters sharing the same phonetic component were homophones or near-homophones when the characters were first created.

There is much dispute over the phonology of Old Chinese. Today it is agreed that Old Chinese had consonant clusters such as *kl- and gl-, which do not occur in any modern Chinese dialect. However, the following issues are still open to debate:

• that Old Chinese had pharyngealized consonants or other rare features.^[1]
• that Old Chinese was not monosyllabic.
• that Early Old Chinese was not a tonal language. The tones of Middle Chinese evolved from consonants in Old Chinese that had since changed or disappeared.

The traditional view is that Chinese is an analytic language without inflection. However, since Henri Maspero's pioneering work,^[2] there have been scholars seriously studying the morphology of Old Chinese. Sagart (1999) provides a summary of these efforts, and a word-list based on his work is available at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database[1].

The grammar of Old Chinese is not identical to that of Classical Chinese. Many usages found in Classical Chinese are absent in Old Chinese. For example, the word 其 (qí) can be used as a third-person pronoun (he/she/it/they) in Classical Chinese, but not in Old Chinese, where it serves as a third-person possessive adjective (his/her/its/their).

There is no copula in Old Chinese, the copula 是 (shì) in Middle and modern Chinese being a near demonstrative ("this", which equals 這 (zhè) in modern Chinese) in Old Chinese.

• Baxter, William H. (1992). A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 311012324X.
• Karlgren, Bernhard (1957). Grammata Serica Recensa. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.
• Pulleyblank, E.G. (1962). "The Consonantal System of Old Chinese," Asia Major 9:58-144, 206-65.
• Sagart, Laurent (1999). The Roots of Old Chinese. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ISBN 1556199619.
• Schuessler, Axel (2006). ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824829751.
• Zhengzhang Shangfang 郑张尚芳 (2003). Shanggu yinxi [Old Chinese phonology]. Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe. ISBN 7532092445.

1. ^ Jerry Norman (1994). "Pharyngealization in Early Chinese". Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol.114, No.3, pp. 397-408. Available through JSTOR.
2. ^ Henri Maspero (1930). "Préfixes et dérivation en chinois archaïque". Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 23:5.313-27.

• Odds on the Odes, book review of Baxter's A Handbook of Old Chinese phonology, by Wolfgang Behr
• Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology, Guillaume Jacques
• Old Chinese Wordlist at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database