Classical Chinese Literature - What languages could be written with it? And why?

Question

I understand that classical Chinese (see Wikipedia) was very different from spoken Chinese (at least in the last centuries of its usage). Nevertheless, despite or maybe even because of this, it was used to write more languages than just Chinese.

Three questions:

1. What languages have been written with it? (I know about Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese.)

2. Why was this possible? These languages are not only spoken differently, they have different grammar (or don't they).

3. Currently, if a foreigner wants to learn Classical Chinese, (in all cases known to me) he is asked to learn current spoken Chinese first. After pondering the first two questions - shouldn't it be possible to translate it directly? (aka "read" it in the language of the reader.)

Answer 1

As far as I know, classic Chinese is not used to "write" these languages as you think. Classic Chinese was just used as an "international" language among surrounding countries, like English nowadays. Take the Japanese Language for example.

In ancient times, the Japanese had their own language, but they didn't have a writing system. Of course, China was powerful back then and exerted influence over the surrounding countries. Japan also imported Chinese characters and culture, especially during the beginning of the Tang Dynasty (唐朝) in China.

After learning Chinese characters, some Japanese scholars started to use characters to note the pronuciations for Japanese words, something like the PinYin system, as now we use Latin letters express Chinese. However, every character had its own pronunciation and meaning, so the Japanese created their own "letters", now called "hiragana" and "katakana", based on Chinese characters. For example, the "hiragana" "あ" comes from the character "安", "か" from "加". They look similar, right?

This also happened to Vietnamese. The Vietnamese created their Vietnamese characters(喃字) based on Chinese characters.

Nowadays, the Koreans don't use Chinese characters(but some characters are still used, especially in solemn situation and law), the Japanese still use them, and the Vietnamese quit thoroughly because the French instituted the use of a Roman alphabet during the colonization period.

So I think the answers to your questions would be:

1. None. They developed their own writing system based on Chinese characters and borrowed a lot of words from Chinese
2. Since characters are used as writing system and letters to note the pronunciation. Grammar is not the point
3. Meanings for some characters changes through time. Furthermore, grammar also changes, so if you want to learn classic Chinese, you'd better learn mordern Chinese first. After you learn mordern Chinese, it won't be so hard for you to learn classic Chinese

I suggest everyone who wants to learn Chinese: you might as well learn some classic Chinese. Although we don't speak in Classic Chinese, there are many words(especially idioms) from classic Chinese, such as "多行不义必自毙"，“退避三舍”,“秋波”。Also, you can read some classic poems to get a feeling of classic Chinese.

Edit: More explanations on point 2.

To clarify how the claiss Chinese were imported and affected Japanese. Imagine the steps below.

STEP 1: Japanese had their language, so they could say: "この山は　高い" (This mountain is high), but they could not write this sentence.

STEP 2: They got to learn classic Chinese, and they(especially the nobels) decided to use classic Chinese for communication, because Chinese culture was so attractive to them. Now the classic Chinese worked as a popular foreign language, like English nowadays.

STEP 3: Some Japanese scholars thought:"well, Chinese seems good, why not create our writing system based on it?", and eventually they invented the "hiragara" and "katakara", by abstracting the Chinese Characters. For example, now they have "こ" from “己” and "の" from "乃“ and so on.

STEP 4: Now they could use these "letters" to write down the sentence. It could be like this(without any characters): 　この　やま　は、たかい, but it's not so conevnient because they had to divide every word in writing.

STEP 5: "Hey, we have learnt Chinese. In Chinese, “やま” is "山", and character "高" means high, in our language, it's たかい. Why not use characters to simplify the writing system?", Japanese might think this way. Of course, in Japanese, an adjective has serveral kinds of conjugations, but that doesn't matter, because only the suffix(い) should change, the stem(たか) won't change, so they just used the character “高” for the stem and everything works well. I.e. the negative form of "高い" is "高くない".

So I think you understand why importing characters won't affect the grammar.

Answer 2

As read in reference from Wikipedia (文言文), classic Chinese (文言文) was the oral Chinese back to the 先秦 era (era before Qing Dynasty, i.e. before 221BC).

Even as early as in Han Dynasty (汉朝, 202BC-220) to Tang Dynasty (唐朝, 618-907) period, the oral Chinese had already been shifting apart from classic Chinese (written) and the new Chinese (白话文) had already been merging even in writing. But during these times, the classic Chinese were still applied in most of the writing, especially, as I can imagine, for formal educations.

To answer the questions:

1. as stated in the same Wikipedia page, before 20th Century, it was used in China, Korean peninsula, Japan and Vietnam, and in almost all formal writtings in these areas at that time. Later, gradually, these countries shifted to their own writing systems.

2. actually, just to answer this question, grammar seems not that important in Chinese as it is in English. This may be a very rough explanation. You may need to consult some formal linguistics knowledge for a more accurate answer.

3. why does a foreigner want to learn the classic Chinese in the first place? FYI, it is not used at all in almost all daily conversations, and it is really one of the biggest nightmares for Chinese students as it is compulsory in high school. In my personal experience, even educated Chinese people (say average college graduated) do not master the classic Chinese.

Answer 3

1. The wiki link you provided can explain this very well. For historic reasons, the Chinese writing system influenced almost all of East Asia. So many countries and nations used Chinese characters or borrowed a subset of Chinese characters. That's another story.

2. If you want the answer to this question, you should check the History books. In short, countries like Korea and Vietnam used to be ancient China's tributaries. For communication with the Chinese government, they took Chinese characters as their own languages' written characters.

   But Japan is different, Japan was never a tributary of China. The Chinese traveled to Japan, then the Japanese took some parts from Chinese characters to construct their own writing system. On the other hand, Chinese language researchers believe one important reason why China did not fragment into smaller countries like Europe did is because of their written language. Chinese has so many dialects but only have one written language.

3. Even in China, students won't study classical Chinese until they enter 9th grade. So it is true like you said, learn modern Chinese first then Classic. Many Chinese idioms (成语) are inherited from classical Chinese and used widely in modern life. So I believe that before you can learn classical Chinese, you'll need to be build a strong foundation with modern Chinese.

Answer 4

To take one example, the Japanese language has two "strains," an indigenous strain, and a "Chinese" strain. The latter is written using "Kanji" (classical Hanzi), and if not identical to Chinese, is recognizable to Chinese speakers. Likewise, the Japanese use of Kanji is similar (although not identical) to the corresponding Hanzi. Thus, a Chinese person writing Hanzi could be understood by a Japanese, but a Japanese person speaking the "indigenous" strain would be incomprehensible to a Chinese.

It's like saying that English has both Germanic and Latin strains, therefore two words, "chair" and "stool" that correspond to the French "chaise." The English speaker might be comprehensible to a Frenchman speaking or writing about "chairs," and other French-based words, but not when using Germanic words like "stool."