Old Chinese

Old Chinese (simplified Chinese: 上古汉语; traditional Chinese: 上古漢語; pinyin: shànggǔ hànyǔ), also called Archaic Chinese in older works, refers to the form of Chinese spoken from the beginning of written records (around 1200 BC) until the 3rd century BC. The earliest inscriptions are undoubtedly Chinese, but are limited in scope and not fully understood.

Within historical Chinese phonology, the term refers to the language reflected by the rhymes of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic components of Chinese characters, corresponding to the earlier half of the 1st millennium BC. Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the sounds of this language by comparing this data with what is known of Middle Chinese. Many details are still disputed, but most recent reconstructions agree on the basic structure. It is widely agreed that unlike later forms of the language, Old Chinese allowed consonant clusters at the beginning and end of the syllable, but lacked tones. The tone distinctions of Middle Chinese are believed to reflect earlier final consonants. Simple derivational morphology has also been identified.

The latter part of the Old Chinese period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and the Tao Te Ching. As a result, Old Chinese was preserved for the following two millennia in the form of Classical Chinese, a style of written Chinese that sought to emulate the grammar and vocabulary of those works.