Perhaps the first thing that strikes us when we look at texts from the post-classical period is the sharp increase in the number of disyllabic notional words. This clearly distinguishes the language of this period from the preceding period, when words in Old Chinese were almost exclusively monosyllabic.
In the 3rd–5th centuries CE, another fundamental shift occurred in the morphology of Old Chinese: the first appearance of the
nominal prefix 阿 ā. It was used with kinship terms: 阿母 āmǔ "mother", 阿妹 āmèi "younger sister", 阿兄 āxióng "older brother", etc.: 阿母得聞之椎床便大怒 āmǔ dé wén zhī chuí chuáng biàn dà nù "The mother heard about this, started pounding on the bed, and became terribly angry."
The prefix 阿 ā was also used with the interrogative pronoun 誰 shuí: 汝是阿誰 rǔ shì āshuí "And who are you?" In addition, this prefix was attached to personal names, especially "milk" names:
忽出喚曰阿鼠,子文不覺應曰諾 hū chū huàn yuē
āshǔ, zǐ wén bù jué yìng yuē nuò "She suddenly came out and called: "Ashu!" Ziwen automatically responded: "Yes!""
In post-classical times, a new function word, 便 biàn, replaced a number of function words and phrases used in pre-classical and classical Chinese to denote a sequence of actions expressed by several predicatives. It behaves like an adverb and therefore stands
before the predicate:
十月已滿,其大夫人便生男兒 shí yuè yǐ mǎn, qí dà fū
rén biàn shēng nán ér "Ten months passed, and his eldest wife gave birth to a boy."
The second meaning of the word 便 biàn, semantically close to the first, is "immediately", "at once": 王便可之 wáng biàn kě zhī "And the ruler immediately agreed to this."
便可白公姥 biàn kě bái gōng lǎo "Now we can tell the father-in-law and mother-in-law."
One category of compound predicatives appearing
in post-classical languages are words denoting qualities or properties, formed by adding a modal predicative kě to a notional word. A compound predicative formed in this way cannot have objects, i.e., it is intransitive:
可憐 kě lián "to be likable" (from 憐 lián "to love"; not to be confused with modern "to be worthy of pity"!).
The use of names as pronouns in post-classical Chinese has undergone some changes compared to earlier periods: the words 君 jūn and 卿 qīng began to be used to address an interlocutor.
The first of these, known since the early classical period, is more formal and emphasizes a certain distance in the position of the speakers; The second is more
intimate.
In this regard, a story recounted in one of the stories by Liu Yiqing, a writer of that era, is quite revealing.
A certain Yu Gui, trying to show that he was on friendly terms
with a high-ranking official, Wang Yan, persistently addressed him using the word "qīng," while Wang Yan continued to call him "jūn." This did not
disturb Yu Gui, who said: "You call me 'you,' and I will call you 'you'!"
It is in this sense that in our text the husband calls his wife 卿
qīng, she calls him 君 jūn, and herself 妾 qiè or 賤妾 jiàn qiè.
In classical Chinese, this phrase was the main one for introducing direct speech. Now the phrase "曰 yuē" is becoming less and less common
and is gradually disappearing.
Instead of 曰 yuē, other significant signs are beginning to be used
words with the meaning to speak: 云 yún, 言 yán, 説 shuō, 白 bái, 謂 wèi,
啟 qǐ:定伯誑之,言我亦鬼 dīng bó kuáng zhī, yān wǒ yì guǐ
“Ding-bo deceived him by saying: “I am also the soul of the deceased!”
阿母謂阿女,汝可去應之āmǔ wèi ānǚ, rǔ kě qù yìng zhī
"The mother said to her daughter: 'You can give consent!'"
The ancient Chinese loom, as it existed in the last centuries BC, is known to us from Han stone carvings.
This is a horizontal loom
with footrests. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, looms were significantly improved.
The looms for the production of polychrome silk fabrics were particularly complex. For home weaving, looms of a simpler design were used; they could weave single-color taffeta (素 sù). The quantity of finished fabric was measured in pieces
(匹 pǐ).
