how are ancient chinese language studied? how can we use today’s standard of pinyin to know how characters sound.
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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.
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