how are ancient chinese language studied? how can we use today’s standard of pinyin to know how characters sound.
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We don’t know exactly how ancient Chinese sounded like. In fact we don’t know how exactly any ancient language sounded like, but for some we have a better guess than others.
Quick aside, a phonetic alphabet gives pretty good clues, so even though ancient versions of that language might be different, we believe from the written language alone that it’s close. And the closer a word’s modern pronunciation is to its spelling, the closer we believe the ancient pronunciation is to the modern (example “good” is close while “though” is less close).
Ok so what about Chinese? Pinyin was only invented in modern times, so we have no records of ancient Chinese using it – it’s not a useful guide. The written system historically was all Chinese characters, and the characters are almost entirely not phonetic. So at face value they do not give a clue to pronunciation. However we have some texts that give clues:
1. Poetry and song. We have an understanding of the meter and the rhyming scheme, so we know which characters likely sound alike.
2. Childhood education guides. There are texts used to train children to read (similar to, say, the alphabet song). They explicitly tell which characters sound like which other characters.
3. Onomonopeia – words that are used to describe things they sound like are sometimes mildly helpful.
Aside from texts, we have many dialects of Chinese, and they all have some similarities or shared lineage. By combining these types of texts and forming a lineage of similarity between dialects, we can have a guess at what people sounded like at different points in history.
Ancient Chinese language was written with characters that did not have pinyin.
Pinyin was created in 1958 to help people learn and pronounce modern Mandarin.
To know how ancient Chinese characters sounded, scholars use different sources of evidence, such as rhymes in poetry, phonetic components in characters, and historical records of sound changes.
They also compare ancient Chinese with other Sino-Tibetan languages that are related to it.
However, there is still some uncertainty and debate about the exact reconstruction of ancient Chinese sounds.
We don’t. How any ancient langauge sounds is largely lost. The best we have are approximations today derived from things like studying how languages sound today after centuries/millennia of subtle and not so subtle changes in how people speak.
What makes it worse is that Chinese is not phonetic. The written Chinese language is just that, written. It spread to become essentially the written universal language in Asia. Which is why you see traditional Chinese characters in written Japanese (The phonetic characters are also derived from Chinese characters). The spoken language and the written language are completely separate.
You can see this in modern spoken language in China. Every region in China has their own “dialect” of Chinese. Which is misleading because “dialect” in this context is more like a completely separate language that sometimes sounds nothing like Mandarin. A lot of them actually have incompatible grammar. It’s more like the role English plays in Europe. You have French, German, Spanish, Portugese, etc spoken in the various countries. But English is widely understood and used.
If you want your mind blown look up on Youtube compilation videos of common things like good morning in the various “dialects” spoken in China. Some sound very similar to Mandarin, others sound like a completely different language. Which leads to something else, what even is spoken Ancient Chinese? Mandarin is essentially a mashup of multiple Chinese dialects made to “unify” the spoken language in China.
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