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Added (and optional) note: What did wényánwén sound like?

The language we refer to as wényánwén (or gǔwén 古文) may never have been a spoken
language – it may have from the start have been a type of “shorthand” for a less succinct
spoken form. Certainly, by the time of the Yúan 元 Dynasty (1279-1368) we have
copious sources that show both spoken and written forms, and indicate a wide, though
porous, gap between them. However, for much earlier eras, we have little evidence of
how people actually spoke, and we can’t rule out that early wényánwén replicated spoken
language to the degree that any written language does.

The texts we have so far encountered in this course all date from the late Zhou and early
Hàn periods. The WYW of this period is usually called “Classical Chinese,” because the
late Zhou is known as China’s “Classical” era. The language of this extended period must
have varied greatly over time and space, but we generally refer to it as if it were a
uniform entity: “Old Chinese.” Because Chinese was not written with a phonetic alphabet,
it is particularly difficult for us to reconstruct the phonetics of the underlying language of
Classical texts, but in China, scholars of the Qing 清 Dynasty (1644-1911) devoted much
effort to exploring this issue, and much work has been done by both Chinese and Western
scholars in the century since. Working from the graphemic components of characters
(many of which were clearly meant to convey phonetic information), from the rhymes of
early poetry, textual hints about readings, regular rules of historical phonology, and from
dictionaries organized according to rhymes and phonetic feature, first composed during
the Six Dynasties (六朝, 220-589), Súi (隋, 589-617) and Táng (唐, 618-907) eras,
various reconstructions of Old Chinese pronunciation have been proposed.

There seems to be a growing consensus that Old Chinese was probably not a tone
language, that it included consonant clusters which were largely products of prefixes and
suffixes which influenced meaning (much as the –s suffix is meaningful in creating
plurals in English – some Classical era suffixes are likely to be the sources of later tones),
and that it may be that some words did not strictly conform to the one-character-per-
syllable rule that later became absolute. The more we know about the sound of early
Chinese, the better we will be able to understand difficult texts, such as the line of Shijing
詩經 poetry encountered in the Xìaojing. Here is one relatively non-technical
reconstruction of the pronunciation of that line (N.B. reconstructed forms are each
preceded by an asterisk – I’ve used only one for the entire group here – indicating that
they are theoretical, rather than to be read out orally; these are approximations, especially
for 聿; recall that ʔ represents a glottal stop [like the break in uh-oh], and ə represents the
unstressed sound in words like “pollen” [‘pā-lən]).

無 念 爾 祖 ， 聿 脩 厥 德

*ma nems neʔ tsâʔ， lywət siu kot tək