Classical Chinese as a spoken language: an enquiry
Classical Chinese, as everyone knows, is not currently a spoken language. What fewer people are aware of - even within China - is that it was probably never a spoken language. The language of the classics is, it has been almost universally concluded, simply too terse, abstract and logic-driven to function as a spoken language. It places too big a burden upon the compiler to be used in day-to-day speech.
Moreover, while we have little evidence for old Chinese vernacular, it is far from nonexistent. There are passages in the Stratagems that appear to have been written to mirror everyday speech. It’s hard to convey how alien these sections are, even - possibly especially - for someone literate in Classical Chinese. If anything, it feels closer to modern Japanese, dropping subjects and objects cheerfully whenever the participants feel they are provided by the context. Nevertheless, the very strangeness of these vernacular snippets serves to hint at a shared underlying understanding that did much of the heavy lifting for the speakers. In the philosophical texts - which deal with fundamental ontological disagreements - this is largely absent. Thus, these texts are actually more accessible to members of an alien culture. However, specialists in the field had concluded more or less unanimously that classical Chinese was not a language that functioned orally or aurally, being a purely written idiom.
And then in 2020 the Covid lockdown happened, and something strange and apparently largely unremarked occurred: a generation of scholars emerged whose primary spoken Chinese dialect was classical. Normally students of classical Chinese - whether native sinophone or not - will learn it as an addition to their primary studies in modern Chinese, and will always deal primarily with the modern language, even though most of their published materials may focus on the ancient one. Under the lockdown, however, written language suddenly became preeminent. Scholars went from dealing with maybe a 60:40 ratio of modern-to-ancient, to something like 10:90. The result was that by the time things opened up again, Classical Chinese was the primary Sinitic idiom of many foreign scholars. Me included.
A friend flew back to China for the first time in a few years, and upon touch-down asked one of the airport staff to direct him to the bathroom with a polite 廁與何？which would have been perfectly serviceable 2000 years ago but sounds unhinged to a modern speaker. Even now, well after the end of the lockdown, I find myself mentally translating sentences from Classical to modern in conversation. Modern Chinese speakers, who continued speaking their own language even during the tightest lockdowns, have not experienced this as far as I know.
The ability to convey extremely condensed, rigorous IF-THEN statements is at the heart of classical Chinese, though not every sentence in the language does it. We can probably approach something like the lost ancient vernacular by attempting to use it in daily life, but we’ll never replicate key features of the written language in speech because the thought patterns underlying them require time.
In the examples from the Stratagems there are sections that clearly feel like they’re supposed to be representing speech patterns at the time, and then there are bits that no one could say aloud without writing out first.