The earliest Chinese was probably spoken without tones
Tones seem inseparable from Chinese today, yet most recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, the ancestor of every modern variety, describe a language without them. Instead it had consonant clusters at the ends of syllables, which later wore down into the tonal distinctions of Middle Chinese. Its earliest records are carved on bones from around 1250 BC.
Those first texts are oracle bones found at Yinxu near modern Anyang, the last Shang capital: short divination inscriptions cut into turtle shells and ox shoulder blades. They are hard to read, packed with proper names and narrow in subject, and only about half of the roughly 4,000 characters used have been securely identified. Under the Zhou, from around 1000 BC, long bronze inscriptions took over, remarkably uniform across the realm, which suggests they recorded a prestige form spoken by the elite.
The script developed in stages that mirror Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform and Maya writing. Some words were drawn as pictures, such as sun, person and tree, or as abstract signs like three and up. Words that could not be pictured borrowed a character for something that sounded similar: the word for tremble was first written with the sign for chestnut. Later a meaning marker was added to tell the pair apart, so tremble gained the element for heart. By the 2nd century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, 82 percent of its 9,353 characters were compounds of this sound-plus-meaning kind.
Because the script hides pronunciation, linguists rebuild the sounds from indirect clues: the sound components inside characters, the rhymes of the Classic of Poetry, which let most characters be sorted into 30 or 31 rhyme groups, and later evidence from Southern Min and old Vietnamese borrowings. Old Chinese also had word-building prefixes and suffixes, for turning nouns into verbs or making verbs causative, most of which had faded by the classical era, leaving word order and particles to carry the grammar.
Most researchers place Chinese in the Sino-Tibetan family alongside Tibetan and Burmese, a link first proposed in the early 19th century, although that family is far less reconstructed than Indo-European. The late Zhou produced the Analects and the Mencius, whose style became the model for Literary Chinese, the formal written standard across China and its neighbours until the early 20th century.
Source: Old Chinese
