Wen Yan

According to a more scholarly definition, Classical Chinese refers specifically to the language of the later Zhou dynasty, i.e., the Spring and Autumn Period. As such, it is the language of many of China's most influential books: the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Daodejing, the Records of the Grand Historian, etc. Literary Chinese is considered by many to begin with the Han Dynasty, although scholars differ about specifics. Literary Chinese was modeled on Classical Chinese, but did change with time.

Whether Classical or Literary, wenyan is in contrast to baihua, which is a writing style that tries to represent modern spoken Chinese in written form. In practice there is a socially accepted continuum between baihua and wenyan. A person writing a letter might include wenyan expressions and phrases to express that the matter being discussed is formal or serious and important. A letter written completely in wenyan would be considered stylistically odd, but not incorrect and certainly not uneducated.

Most Chinese people with at least a middle school education are able to read basic wenyan, because the ability to read (but not write) wenyan is part of Chinese middle school and high school curricula and is part of the college entrance examination. Wenyan is taught primarily by presenting a classical Chinese work and including a baihua gloss that explains the meaning of phrases. Tests on classical Chinese are often essentially translation exercises that ask the student to express the meaning of a paragraph in baihua, using multiple choice.

In addition, many works of literature in wenyan (such as Tang poetry) have major cultural influences. However, even with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, wenyan can be extremely difficult to decipher, even by educated native speakers of Chinese, because of its heavy use of literary references and allusions as well as its extrmely abbreviated style.

Wenyan is distinguished from baihua by the use of different lexical items (i.e., vocabulary) and a style that is extremely concise and compacted. Differences in lexicon tend to be in transition and grammatical words, although wenyan also has a tendency not to use bisyllabic character combinations; many more single-character words are found in wenyan than in baihua. Furthermore, wenyan frequently drops subjects, verbs, objects, etc. when their meaning is understood; wenyan did not develop a subject inanimate pronoun ("it" used as a subject) until quite late. A sentence that may take 20 characters in baihua can often be rendered in wenyan in four or five. In addition to grammar and vocabulary differences, wenyan can be distinguished by an effort to maintain parallelism and rhythm, even in prose works, and its extensive use of allusions that also contribute to the brief style.

Wenyan was the primary form used in Chinese literary works until the May Fourth Movement, and was also heavily used in Japan and Korea. Exceptions to the use of wen yan were vernacular novels such as The Dream of the Red Chamber, which was considered low class at the time. Today, pure wenyan is occasionally used in formal or ceremonial occasions. The anthem San Min Chu-i (py San1min2 Zhu3yi4), for example, is in wenyan. Most often, people will, in certain situations, add classical terms to writing in order to make it seem more formal. Ironically, Classical Chinese was used to write the Hunman jeong-eum in which the modern Korean alphabet (Hangul) was promulgated and the essay by Hu Shi in which he argued against using Classical Chinese and in favor of baihua.

For the most part, though, wenyan Chinese is today almost a purely literary language. When reading wenyan, the Chinese characters are generally read with the pronunciations of the reader's own variety of Chinese, such as modern Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese. Because of phonological drift, the original pronunciations are often quite different from the Mandarin readings. This means that characters which once rhymed 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 apparently adhered more closely to the original pronunciations. In the subjective opinion of many Chinese people, wenyan literature, especially poetry, sounds better when read with a southern dialect such as Cantonese or Southern Min.