Classical Chineselexicon is the lexicon of Classical Chinese, a language register marked by a vocabulary that greatly differs from the lexicon of modern vernacular Chinese. 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 modernChinese 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 ancientChinese literature, it has almost none of the two-syllable words present in modern Chinese varieties. 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, Literary Chinese has several, many of which are used as part of honorific language, and several of which have different grammatical uses. In syntax, Classical Chinese is always ready to forego subjects, verbs, objects, etc. when their meaning is understood. Also, 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" is a copula in modern Chinese but in old Chinese it was originally a near demonstrative ; the modern Chinese for "this" is "這". 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. The Muslim Hui people developed Jingtang Jiaoyu for representing Arabic sounds with Chinese characters. Classical Chinese has had influence of Jingtang Jiaoyu. Rather than using StandardChinese grammar, they use the grammar of their dialect and Classical Chinese to read the Arabic sounds out loud. The Classical Chinese word order is often the reverse of Mandarin; for example, Mandarin 饒恕 is Classical 恕饒. Many final particles and interrogative particles are found in Literary Chinese.
Function words
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.
