Old/Middle Chinese

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Is anyone here by any chance into Old/Middle Chinese? Or into the development of Chinese tones, loss of morphology, acquiring of tones, evolution of its writing system?

Sort of, I suppose - I taught myself Classical Chinese some years ago in order to read books like the Dao De Jing, Zhuang Zi, Confucius and the Shi Jing. Old poetry is one of my 'things'. I love the Shi Jing, and poets like Tao Yuan Ming (Tao Qian), Du Fu, Li Bai, etc. I haven't looked into the history of the characters but love the how the traditional characters look and fit together. I've heard that many of the old poems rhyme much better in dialects other than Mandarin (say, in Hokkien or Cantonese). I'd put Chinese aside to work on something else, but miss it and really want to get back into it, maybe looking at Qu Yuan this time round.

Interesting. I don't know enough about the history of the language to comment, though.

I'd like to know why the older Chinese texts get by so often with single words, whereas lots of modern Chinese seems to use a lot more compound words.

I wonder if because, as it seems, final consonants have degraded to some extent, now compound words are needed to avoid confusion between similarly sounding words. I found this on Quora in a discussion of the lack of variety of endings in Mandarin (-n, -ng):

"It has to do with the history of the Mandarin language. In the long history leading to what we call the Mandarin language, -n and -m endings merged to -n; -t, -p and -k endings got dropped. So in Middle Chinese and many Southern Chinese languages today (and Sino-Korean & Sino-Vietnamese), there are 6 endings (-p -t -k -m -n -ng), while Mandarin has only 2 (-n and -ng).

In late Tang dynasty (more than 1000 years ago), poet 胡曾 wrote an poem called 戲妻族語不正

"making fun of (my) wife who doesn't speak (Chinese) properly":
呼十卻爲石，喚針將作真。 忽然雲雨至，總道是天因。

Basically he was saying that his wife mixed up the pronunciation of “十" and "石", "針” and “真”， “陰” and "因". The latter two pairs have the -m/-n difference according to traditional Chinese phonology, which is still preserved in Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese.

Interestingly, we can see that all the pairs mentioned by 胡曾 got mixed up in modern Mandarin. In other words, modern Mandarin would be 不正 "not proper" according to 胡曾, and his wife might have been speaking a very early form of Mandarin."

I don't know either, and while quora often has some interesting things mentioned, I found this research paper on Modern Chinese as a "language of compound words", maybe it'd be of interest to you: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ound_Words

In this paper we shall address the issue of the massive creation of complex words in Mandarin Chinese, a phenomenon which has led many linguists to regard Modern Chinese as a "language of compound words". The issue of the massive creation of compound words in Chinese is parallel to another issue, that of the process of disyllabification of the preferred word-form in the historical development of the language. The development of the typical word-form from monosyllabic to disyllabic has in many cases led to incorrect judgments about the compound status of many newly created words. In what follows, we shall first seek a working definition of compound and make some remarks about the concepts of 'morpheme' and 'word', and we shall see how these notions may be applied to the Chinese language (sections 2 and 3); we shall then address the issue of 'compounding' in Chinese from a synchronic point of view, clarifying what kind of complex word forms may be regarded as compounds (section 4). We shall then turn to diachronic issues, and we shall review some of the literature on the evolution of the Chinese word-form (among others, Feng, 2001 and Shi, 2002), from which we may draw a brief sketch of the developmental processes at issue here (section 5). We shall first review the common explanations which one can find in the literature for the development of complex word creation, and then we shall review the phonological/prosodic reason for disyllabification in the Chinese language, which provided the conditions for a number of changes, among which is the increase of compound words, drawing mainly upon analyses by Feng (2001) and Shi (2002), and we shall argue that the basic phonological unit in Modern Chinese is made up of two syllables (a foot, in Feng's terminology; section 6). We shall then introduce our hypothesis, namely that the creation of a large number of compounded words was caused by the interplay of a number of factors, which include the above mentioned phonological simplification and the fact that in the Chinese lexicon there are almost no elements which can act as word boundaries, that is, fusive and/or agglutinative inflectional markers; moreover, the abundance of lexical morphemes, endowed with a stable relationship between phonological and orthographic form, is also supposed to be a facilitating factor in complex word production. We shall compare the Chinese data with some examples of multi-word expressions from the Romance languages, a family where the phenomenon of compounding is not as widespread as in Chinese; our hypothesis is that the different development in the domain of word formation between these two languages / language groups is motivated by the tendency to analyticity in the expression of coordination and subordination relationships both in syntax and in word formation (section 7). Lastly, we shall put forward the hypothesis that the extent to which a language is analytic or synthetic in word formation might have consequences on the development of compounding / complex word creation .

Thanks. This looks interesting, and will give it a read.