Old Chinese

Old Chinese
Archaic Chinese
Zhou dynasty bronze inscription (c. 825 BC)
Native to	Ancient China
Era	Shang dynasty, Zhou dynasty, Warring States period
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Old Chinese
Writing system	Oracle bone script, Bronze script, Seal script
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Linguist list	och
Glottolog	oldc1244
Linguasphere	79-AAA-a
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	上古漢語
Simplified Chinese	上古汉语
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Shànggǔ hànyǔ Wade–Giles Shang-ku han-yü Hakka Romanization Song-gu hon-ngi Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Seuhng-gú hon-yúh Jyutping Soeng6-gu2 hon3-jyu5 Southern Min Hokkien POJ Siōng-kó͘ hàn-gú Teochew Peng'im Ziên6-gou2 hang3-ghe2
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Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the late Shang dynasty. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the Analects, the Mencius, and the Zuozhuan. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese.

Old Chinese was written with an early form of Chinese characters, with each character representing a monosyllabic word. Although the script is not alphabetic, most characters were created by adapting a character for a similar-sounding word. Scholars have used the phonetic information in the script and the rhyming practice of ancient poetry to reconstruct Old Chinese phonology, corresponding roughly to the Western Zhou period in the early part of the 1st millennium BC. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differed from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe Old Chinese as a language without tones, but having consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, which developed into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese.

Most researchers trace the core vocabulary of Old Chinese to Sino-Tibetan, with much early borrowing from neighbouring languages. During the Zhou period, the originally monosyllabic vocabulary was augmented with polysyllabic words formed by compounding and reduplication. Several derivational affixes have also been identified. However the language lacked inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles.