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. 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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