Wenyan and its peculiarities

Abstract

The continuous cultural continuity of the Chinese civilization for thousands of years has established the conditions under which the Chinese spoken language is unlikely to be able to displace the traditional written language. For this reason, a new literary language Baihua – «白话», which is based on the spoken language and its rules of sentenc constructions has become a new part of the written language, enriching and modernizing it, but not displacing the old written language Wenyan, although in the early XX century «classical» written and «live» spoken Chinese languages were opposed to each other.
In times prior to the turn of the two eras, only the written language was known. Irrespective of whether it fixed the spoken language, as many scientists believe, or it was a special written language, it is the only language of that time which has come down to us, and it is formed the basis of the classical written language wenyan» [2, 11-12].
The article describes the main features of the classical Chinese language – Wenyan taking as example the analysis of the XVII century Chinese writer Pu Songling’s language in his novel «婴宁» («Miss Ying-ning, or the laughing girl»).