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.
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