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2 Pronunciation

Since the pronunciation of Old Chinese or other forms of historical Chinese (such as Middle Chinese) have long been lost, characters which once rhymed in poetry often no longer do, or vice versa. Poetry and other rhyme-based writing thus becomes less coherent than the original reading must have been. However, some other modern Chinese dialects adhere more closely to the original pronunciations, as evident by the preservation of rhyme structures. Some Chinese speakers thus believe wenyan literature, especially poetry, sounds better when read with a southern dialect such as Cantonese or Southern Min.

Another phenomenon that is common in reading Classical Chinese is homophony, or words that sound the same. More than 2500 years of sound change separates Classical Chinese from any modern language or dialect, so when reading Classical Chinese in any modern variety of Chinese (especially Mandarin) or in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese, many characters which originally had different pronunciations have become homonyms, making it impossible to orally communicate using Classical Chinese. There is a famous Classical Chinese essay written in the early 20th century by Chinese linguist Zhao Yuanren (趙元任) called the Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den which illustrates this. It is perfectly comprehensible when read, but contains only words that are now pronounced "shi" in Mandarin.

The situation is analogous with some English words that sound the same, such as "meet" and "meat". These two words were pronounced /me:t/ and /mE:t/ (akin to modern "mate" and "met") respectively during the time of Chaucer, as evident by spelling. Today they sound the same, but are distinguished by spelling. English spelling is only a few centuries old, so such examples are not very common; the Chinese writing system is, by contrast, several thousand years old, so such examples are commonplace and exist for nearly all characters.

3 Grammar

Wenyan is distinguished from baihua by the use of different lexical items (i.e., vocabulary) and a style that appears extremely concise and compacted to modern Chinese speakers. For example, wenyan rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are of one syllable only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Chinese dialects where two-syllable words are normal and very common. There is also a greater amount of pronouns present relative to the modern vernacular. In particular, whereas Mandarin has one general character to refer to the personal pronoun "me", Literary Chinese has several, many of which are used as part of 客套语 ( honorific language).

This phenomenon exists because two-syllable words evolved in Chinese to compensate for sound change: as sound changes occurred, words that originally sounded different begin to be pronounced in the same way, and thus have to be distinguished by other means. (Compare "pen"/"pin", identical in the American South, and distinguished only by saying "ink pen" and "safety pin".) Since Classical Chinese is an imitation of Old Chinese, it has none of these two-syllables words. For the same reason, wenyan is much more ready to drop subjects, verbs, objects, etc. when their meaning is understood or readily inferred; wenyan did not develop a subject inanimate pronoun ("it" used as a subject) until quite late. As a result, a sentence that may take 20 characters in baihua can often be rendered in wenyan in four or five.

There are also differences in lexicon, especially in grammatical particles, as well as in syntax.

In addition to grammar and vocabulary differences, wenyan can be distinguished by literary and cultural differences: an effort to maintain parallelism and rhythm, even in prose works, and its extensive use of cultural allusions often unfamiliar to modern readers, thereby also contribute to the brief style.

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