Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [71]
The subsequent history of standard Chinese as spoken is conventionally divided into many periods, Old Chinese (up to 500 BC, represented by the Shījīng, ‘Book of Poetry’), Middle Chinese (500 BC-seventh century AD, represented by the Qièyùn rhyming dictionary), Old Mandarin (seventh to fourteenth centuries), Middle Mandarin (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries) and Modern Mandarin ever since. The prominence of poetry in the early part of this record is not a matter of aesthetics. Given the indirectness of the connection between Chinese script and its pronunciation, the evidence for the development of the spoken language comes mostly from detailed analysis of verse, particularly looking at which words rhyme.
The written language itself does not give much away about language development over the last 2500 years, since the classical language, known as wényán (), was defined in the Chūnqiū, ‘Spring and Autumn’, period (770-476 BC), when the great classics such as Confucius’s Analects were written, and was kept unchanged virtually ever after. It was only in the twentieth century that wényán ceased to be the usual means of written expression, and a new written style, based on the words and structures of Mandarin, became universal. But wényán was formed in a region (the north-east) and at a time that is only a millennium or so after the beginning of Chinese progression across the country. As such, it gives a useful baseline for the changes that have affected different modern dialects over the two and a half millennia since it was the vernacular. For example, in one of the paradoxes typical of language history, it shows that the least-changed dialect of Chinese is the one spoken farthest away from the north-east: Cantonese, known to the Chinese by the name of the long-independent ‘barbarian’ kingdom of Yuè.
The gap between written evidence and spoken reality means that a fair amount of the detail of how influences have played out in the history of the language must remain conjectural. We can only infer, and we cannot fully document, the forces that we shall be describing, some of them operating piecemeal on Chinese to produce the variety of dialects heard, especially in the south, but others keeping the vast majority of speakers in close touch with each other even as the spoken standard gradually moved, all down the ages.
The degree of political unity in China, although its cyclical rise and fall is the usual tick-tock of Chinese history, is not particularly useful in recounting the spread and transformations of the Chinese language. Following the archaeological evidence, Chinese culture spread out from the middle Yellow River valley in all directions, but most significantly towards the south. In the Shang period (middle to late second millennium) we already find artefacts south of the Yangtze, and these spread out upstream into central China in the Zhou (early first millennium BC). But we know that a language different from Chinese was still spoken in the kingdom of Chu (approximately modern Sichuan, north of the Yangtze) in the third century BC*
Geographically, Chinese was moving from the cold, dry northern plains where wheat and millet were cultivated into the warmer, wetter uplands where the staple was rice. As well as a difference in climate, there was a difference in terrain, which made the going much tougher in the south: nán chuán běi mš, ‘south boat, north horse’, as the proverb has it. In practice waterways, defined by nature rather than human resource, are the only way to travel easily in the south. This was not a barrier to Chinese cultural and linguistic spread, but it did mean that uniformity, cultural or linguistic, was never so easily imposed there.
The motive