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In terms of conciseness and compactness, Classical Chinese 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, in which two-syllable words are extremely common. This phenomenon exists, in part, because polysyllabic words evolved in Chinese to disambiguate homophones that result from sound changes. This is similar to such phenomena in English as the pen–pin merger of many dialects in the American south: because the words "pin" and "pen" sound alike in such dialects of English, a certain degree of confusion can occur unless one adds qualifiers like "ink pen" and "stick pin." Similarly, Chinese has acquired many polysyllabic words in order to disambiguate monosyllabic words that sounded different in earlier forms of Chinese but identical in one region or another during later periods. Because Classical Chinese is based on the literary examples of ancient Chinese literature, it has almost none of the two-syllable words present in modern varieties of Chinese.
Classical Chinese has more pronouns compared to the modern vernacular. In particular, whereas Mandarin has one general character to refer to the first-person pronoun ("I"/"me"), Literary Chinese has several, many of which are used as part of honorific language (see Chinese honorifics), and several of which have different grammatical uses (first-person collective, first-person possessive, etc.).[citation needed]
In syntax, Classical Chinese words are not restrictively categorized into parts of speech: nouns used as verbs, adjectives used as nouns, and so on. There is no copula in Classical Chinese; "是" (pinyin:shì) is a copula in modern Chinese but in old Chinese it was originally a near demonstrative ("this"), the modern Chinese equivalent of which is "這" (pinyin:zhè).[citation needed]
Beyond grammar and vocabulary differences, Classical Chinese can be distinguished by literary and cultural differences: an effort to maintain parallelism and rhythm, even in prose works, and extensive use of literary and cultural allusions, thereby also contributing to brevity.
Many final particles (Chinese:歇語字; pinyin:xiēyǔzì; Wade–Giles:hsieh1-yü3-tzu4) and[1] interrogative particles are found in Literary Chinese.[2]
1. The word used as a tone for the end of the sentence, which is equivalent to 「啊」、「呢」
生而有疾惡焉，順是，故殘賊生而忠信亡焉。
(Human beings) were born with hatred; (because) people followed (it), cruelty and brutality grew (within them), and faithfulness died out (end of sentence).
2. For the tone of the words express a standstill for the sentence
3. Used as a pronoun, which is equivalent to "he", "them", "it", "here" and "where"
4. Used as pronouns, equivalent to 「豈」 (how/what), 「如何」 (what)
Used as a preposition for place, reason; expression of action behaviour and the introduction of premises, time, motion, target, location, relationship between people, introduction to the object of comparison or analogy.
Sun Zi says: Of war, life-and-death's field, survival-and-extinction's way, should not be unexamined.
4. Nominalization marker. Inserted between subject and predicate to convert a clause into a noun phrase. Can be thought of as an extension of (2) above.
喜怒哀樂之動乎中，必見乎外。
The welling of happiness, anger, grief, or pleasure in one's heart is always outwardly expressed.
5. Transitive verb, "to go"
吾欲之南海，如何？
I wish to go to the southern seas; what do you think?
Note that for the descriptions provided above, English equivalents are provided in double quotation marks (""), while equivalents in vernacular Chinese are provided in hooked brackets (「」).
Content words
As with function words, there are many differences between the content words of Classical Chinese and those of Baihua. Below are synonyms used in the two registers. Some Classical Chinese words can have more than one meaning.
However, Classical Chinese words still exist among many chengyu, or Chinese idioms.
The Classical Chinese words and examples will be written in traditional Chinese characters, and the modern vernacular will be written in both simplified and traditional characters.
↑ J. J. Brandt (1936). Introduction to literary Chinese (2ed.). H. Vetch. p.169. Retrieved 10 February 2012. PART III GRAMMATICAL SECTION THE FINAL PARTICLES (歇語字 hsieh1-yü3-tzu4) The Wenli-style abounds with so called final particles. These particles(the University of Michigan)
↑ J. J. Brandt (1936). Introduction to literary Chinese (2ed.). H. Vetch. p.184. Retrieved 10 February 2012. PART III GRAMMATICAL SECTION THE INTERROGATIVE PARTICLES The Wen-li style particularly abounds with the interrogative particles.(the University of Michigan)
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