The h > sh shift from ancient Chinese to modern Mandarin

[hansioux]

@OysterOmelet

and Mandarin being a young language.

When the Ming empire collapsed, the Guanhua (Chinese koine) at the time was based on the Nanjing accent, and that was evident in Matteo Ricci, Ferdinand Verbiest and Johann Adam Schall von Bell’s records.

The current form of Mandarin wasn’t widely used in Beijing’s outer city even by 1815 when Robert Morrison wrote his Chinese dictionary.

So the current form of Mandarin probably didn’t gain its current status until the 1850s. Based on that, the current form of Mandarin is probably at most 200 years old, and grew out of the Manchu-Old Pekingese pidgin adopted by the Manchus living in the Inner city.

I wrote a much more detailed post on this subject here:

Chinese is such an archaic language, it will be very difficult

Ok, I feel like I need to rehash some of the things I’ve mentioned on forumosa before. When the Manchu sacked Beijing in 1644, people of Beijing spoke the Mandarin (官話) of the time, the Chinese Koine, which was based on the Nanjing accent, since Ming was founded by a group of people from the south, and the first capital of Ming was Nanjing. The Nanjing accent, which is a part of the Wu branch, retained many features of Middle Chinese. The Chinese Koine at the time still retained most checke…