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Declarative, Exclamatory, Interrogative and Imperative Sentences
According to the purpose or mood of expression, sentences can be divided into four types: declarative (or statement), exclamatory, interrogative and...
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Tonal and Rhythmic Patterns
Literary compositions in rhyme appear early in ancient Chinese, mostly to the beat of labor routines in everyday life. The ballads and proverbs in...
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Interpretation of Word Meaning
As mentioned earlier, to interpret words, we should get some basic knowledge of extensions, phonetic loans and “cognate words with similar...
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Flexible Use of Parts of Speech
To distinguish parts of speech is the basis for syntactic and grammatical analysis of ancient Chinese. Except in some special cases, parts of speech...
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“Cognate Words with Similar Pronunciation” (義存於聲) and “Interchangeable Words with Similar Pronunciation” (聲**義通) in Exegesis
Wang Yinzhi, in his General Exegeses of the Classics, quoted the words of his father Wang Niansun “Meanings of alliterative and rhymed characters are...
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Prologue
The ancient Chinese is the language from which modern Chinese language is derived. That is to say, ancient Chinese language evolved to what is now...
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Rhetorical Devices in Chinese Classic Literature
Chinese classic literary works teem with various rhetorical devices, yet a systematic and comprehensive review is still lacking today. For the...
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Judgment Sentences and Declarative Sentences
In modern Chinese, most of judgment sentences use the judgement verb “是” (beverb). Only in special cases, “是” is omitted. However, in ancient...
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Ancient Speech Sounds
The historical changes of speech sounds are very complicated, involving not only chronological variations across eras, but also dialectal variations...
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Personal Pronouns and Demonstrative Pronouns
Pronouns serve the functions of substitution and demonstration. For example, “吾” (I) and “爾” (you) can be used to replace persons, while “彼” (that)...
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General Knowledge of Classic Chinese Bibliography
The general knowledge of classic Chinese bibliography is on the “periphery” of classic Chinese. Reading ancient Chinese books is essential to the...
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Sentences
A sentence is a basic unit of language. The smallest free unit—word—can express meaning and exchange ideas only by forming a complete sentence...
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Rhyme Books and Dengyun
Among the extant materials of fanqie in the rhyme books of the Song Dynasty, there are 3,815 phoneticized characters (qieyin) in Guangyun, and 4,473...
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Ellipsis and Word Order
Ellipsis is a common phenomenon in both ancient and modern Chinese. As ellipsis is more frequently used in ancient Chinese, a detailed discussion is...
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Doubtful Expressions in Ancient Books
Chinese ancient books, especially those written in the Pre-Qin Period, contained Many unique expressions that were significantly different from those...
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Sounds, Rhymes and Tones
When it comes to Chinese language phonological changes are the most complicated and most significant of all. In The Book of Songs, the songs were...
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Quantity and Comparison
In linguistic studies, the quantity of concrete objects is called nominal quantification while the quantity of actions is called verbal...
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A Brief Introduction to Form and Meaning of Chinese Characters & Dictionaries
A writing system, as a tool of recording, is attached to language with visual symbols as the medium. The sound (音) in pronunciation is different from...
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Modal Auxiliary Words and Affixes
Except nouns, verbs, adjectives and their adjuncts, many other words in ancient Chinese are very abstract. Ancient scholars, in research and...
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Compound Sentences and Conjunctions
There are a great number of long simple sentences in modern written Chinese, and they tend to contain a lot of coordinated structures and modifying...